Companies Using Mastodon

In our data, whoever runs a Mastodon server: individuals and small groups, plus organisations hosting their own. 64.53% of matched companies have 1 to 10 employees, and Software Development (25.23%) leads the industries. Organisations include the City of Amsterdam, EPFL, Heise and Wikimedia Deutschland, all of which served Mastodon from a social. subdomain on 6 November 2026.

Mastodon has no customers in the usual sense; it's free software. Our November 2026 crawl counts 1,679 domains running a Mastodon server after removing 3 for-sale and gambling pages, and 179 match a company. Since 16 March 2026, 76 domains stopped running it on every hostname. The count is servers, not users: the median server in our sample reported 3 active users a month.

Mastodon holds 0.56% of Community & Comments at TechnologyChecker.io, 12th of 63 rows, on 1,679 cleaned domains. Livefyre (80.15%) and Disqus (4.47%) lead, both comment widgets, followed by forum software such as XenForo and phpBB. The share counts domains hosting a server, so it says nothing about how many people use Mastodon.

Nothing in our category does the same job. Its rows are comment widgets such as Disqus (13,453 domains), forum software such as XenForo (8,092), phpBB (7,040) and Discourse (4,160), and Reddit (2,007). The one switching pair we publish is 4 domains that dropped Livefyre while gaining Mastodon, which isn't a like-for-like move.

The United States, with 45 of the 179 companies we matched, then Germany (33), France (20), the United Kingdom (18) and the Netherlands (12). European countries in the top 15 add up to 105, well over half. Public bodies are part of it: Amsterdam, Blois, Schleswig-Holstein and France's DINUM all run their own servers.

Mostly small. 64.53% of matched companies with a known size have 1 to 10 employees and 22.67% have 11 to 50. 13 have more than 500 staff, including cities, universities and research centres such as Amsterdam, Forschungszentrum Jülich and the University of Innsbruck, which run a server for official accounts or staff.

Fairly young. Of matched companies with a founding year, 41.73% started in the 2010s, 23.62% in the 2000s and 18.9% in the 2020s. 15.75% predate 2000, including cities, universities and publishers such as the City of Amsterdam, EPFL and the Dutch weekly De Groene Amsterdammer.

On our data: a software, internet or IT firm with 1 to 10 staff, in the US, Germany, France or the UK, founded in the 2010s, running its own Mastodon server on a social. or mastodon. subdomain, often through a managed host. A second profile is European public bodies and universities hosting official accounts.

A Mastodon server, or instance, is one independently run copy of the Mastodon software where people hold accounts. joinmastodon.org says every server is operated by an independent organisation or individual, and accounts on different servers can follow each other. Each domain in our count of 1,679 is one such server.

Yes. joinmastodon.org says that to be in complete control you can create your own server, and the software is free under the AGPL-3.0 licence, per its GitHub repository. Many people do: 13 of the 39 servers in our sample that reported usage had one active user or none. Others use a managed host; at least 6 of our 40 point at Masto.host.

Yes, though most servers are small. 1,679 domains ran a Mastodon server in our November 2026 crawl, and the monthly raw count has held between 1,675 and 1,688 since September. The median server in our random sample reported 3 active users in the past month. Mastodon shipped version 4.7.5 on 3 November 2026 and a 5.0 beta the next day.

Our count is domains, so it can't rank servers by users. In our random 40, only one reported more than 1,000 active users in the past month and the median reported 3. joinmastodon.org's main sign-up button points new users to mastodon.social. The organisations' servers we checked are small, with 5 to 35 active users a month.

Not in our data. A rel="me" link, which joinmastodon.org's verification page describes as the way to verify a website on a Mastodon profile, sits in a page's HTML. Our rule reads only the Server: Mastodon header and Mastodon's session cookie, which only a Mastodon server sends. A site that verifies itself or embeds a feed isn't counted.