Where is Mastodon today? What are its stats?
Latest Firefox and Windows 10.
>> "Where is Mastodon today? What are its stats?"
This is the wrong question before you ask about the goals of the platform and its users. Stats only let you compare it against something it might have no interest in being.
Your dismissal of it and other open source efforts is likely due to a goal mismatch. The fact that you spent so much money on it tells me you're probably aiming at a Twitter competitor.
I don't care about Twitter and its goals. I care about what Mastodon is and what I already do with it. It's self-funding and community supported. There are plenty of people on it, and it's still growing. It seems like someone's making a new thing with ActivityPub every month that I can interact with from my Mastodon account. That's all that matters to me, and seems to be enough for most of the people on it.
What we built is a GENERAL PURPOSE OPEN SOURCE SOCIAL APP PLATFORM.
Like Wordpress but for collaboration.
The goal is total reusability. You release an app for your community and install some plugins for various functionality. Then you throw some “tools” on “pages”. Apply styles. And you’re done. Your app works on the web on every device, can be released in app stores, integrates with notifications, contacts, etc. out of the box.
What sort of “tools” can you have in your apps? Well here is just a sample:
Chatroom
Chess game
Collaborative documents
Blogging
Group rides
Events and checkins
Role based access control integrated with contacts
Invites
Realtime updates
Offline notifications
Relations and indexing
And more. We provide a standard interface for people to basically collaborate with one another, and do it across domains too. Meanwhile developers can add new types of “streams” and “tools” for app developers and also startups can package and sell various apps to communities. Everyone can re-use code. Did you see the video?
No one's investing or expecting a return on a million dollars in investment with it. It's already a W3C standard. One popular piece of software (which you dismissed) supports it. Other promising attempts like Plume (blogging), Pixelfed (image sharing), and Aardwolf (Facebook-like) are in development. They're already revenue neutral (or better) from the Patreons and Liberapays that provide their funding.
From that perspective, your thing is just another closed-off ecosystem that doesn't talk to any other. Open source is not sufficient when we're talking about social media software. My new social graph is growing, and it's not dependent on someone expecting an ROI.
I understand you started this project before ActivityPub was a thing, and before anyone took federated social media seriously. But that's the hazard with starting early: sometimes something comes along and forces you to change how you think.
You missed the boat, and you don't realize it because you're busy building a yacht that holds smaller yachts. It's a nice yacht, but I like the growing network of party barges I'm on.