Open social daus

If we hope to see Open Social Protocols succeed – that is, be available and widely adopted as open protocols that many people, apps, organizations, and more can use and interoperate between – we need to track what the Daily Active Users (DAUs) look like.

Looking at some of Dan Romero's comments around Farcaster, his goal is 10M DAU as having large global impact. That translates to somewhere in the range of 100M to 500M accounts.

Likely of use will be looking at Social Platform DAUs to compare and contrast.

ActivityPub

FediDB is the main dashboard. It only tracks Monthly Active Users (MAU), which will be a much higher number than DAU. Powered by a crawler that retrieves self-reported data from instance servers

May 2024

• ~1M MAU, hard to compare directly to DAU
• Not sure how active is calculated – has had an active session at least once in the last month is what I think it is, which would also be broader than "has posted at least once this month"
• Does not currently seem to include Threads, or maybe that just shows up under "Other" since it's per user opt-in
• 72% Mastodon

ATProtocol

A couple of independent dashboards:

• Jazco Stats - clear and simple, charts for daily likers / posters / followers, goes back to May 2023
• edavis bskycharts - extensive charts you can drill into powered by Munin, started gathering ~February 2024

May 2024

• Daily Likers seems like it captures a slightly wider, but for a more direct apples-to-apples (Farcaster does casts, no idea how FediDB measures active), daily posters seems most relevant, so around ~150K to ~180K
• edavis shows Daily/Weekly/Monthly active across all actions, not just posting, which looks to be around ~300K
• edavis seems to show ~1.2M monthly active – which would make it bigger than ActivityPub

Farcaster

Farcaster.network Dashboard

May 2024

• 357K users
• 1K Hubs
• Daily Active Casters, aka at least one cast per day posted, 45K - 50K