At a time when social media changes faster than TikTok's algorithms, the Fediverse offers a different idea: an open social network where accounts don't belong to a single company. We wrote this article in 2024 and updated it in October 2026, because by now it is clearer how much of the promise has held up.
01What the Fediverse is
The Fediverse, short for “federated universe”, is a network of independent but connected servers that lets people communicate and interact across different platforms. Each server (or “instance”) has its own rules, users and content, but they all talk to each other through shared protocols, the best known being ActivityPub.
Email is the handiest comparison. If you're on Yahoo and a friend is on Gmail, you can still write to each other, because both services follow the same standards. The Fediverse works the same way, except that everything is public: profiles and posts can be seen across lots of servers.
- Server (instance)
- A site that hosts accounts, with its own rules and moderation. Example: mastodon.social.
- Protocol
- The shared language servers use to exchange posts and follows: ActivityPub in the Fediverse, AT Protocol on Bluesky.
- Platforms
- Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube and, for those who switch it on, Threads.
02The Fediverse in numbers
The figures come from Meta's earnings call, the Bluesky blog and Mastodon's statistics. They aren't directly comparable: Meta and Mastodon count monthly active users, Bluesky counts accounts. But the order of magnitude says enough: Threads is a mass network, Mastodon is still a niche community.
03Why it matters to marketers
- Reach across platforms. A Threads post, with Fediverse sharing switched on, can also be seen by people on Mastodon. Your audience grows without duplicating content.
- More diverse communities. In a fragmented social media landscape, you can reach new communities without depending on a single platform's users.
- Faster experimentation. The protocols are open, so anyone can build new apps and features. For marketers, that means more tools and formats to test.
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04Meta's role in the Fediverse
Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, took a surprising step towards the Fediverse with Threads, launched in July 2023. Threads uses the ActivityPub protocol, and since 2024 its users can turn on Fediverse sharing: people on Mastodon and other servers can follow Threads accounts without having one.
The feature has stayed optional and started in March 2024 as a test, for public profiles of over-18s only. Threads has since reached 500 million monthly active users. But Meta presents the growth as the app's success and publishes no figures on traffic between Threads and the rest of the Fediverse.
05Bluesky: decentralised, but not quite the Fediverse
The decentralised alternative that grew fastest was Bluesky. The company says it passed 43 million users in March 2026, up from 13 million in October 2024, and more than 2 million more joined in the following four months.
Bluesky uses a different protocol, though, the AT Protocol, and does not talk directly to Mastodon or Threads. The link only works through third-party bridges, which are imperfect.
Mastodon has stayed far smaller: around 741,000 monthly active users in October 2026, out of roughly 10.5 million accounts. For a brand, that means niche communities, often technical or journalistic, not mass audiences.
06What this means for brands
The Fediverse has not become the social network of the near future, but the idea behind it, accounts and content that do not belong to a single platform, still matters. For most brands it does not yet justify a separate budget. It depends on where your audience is:
- Tech, media, education, public sector. These Fediverse communities are active and worth watching.
- Already on Threads. Turning on Fediverse sharing costs little and may bring a few valuable conversations.
- Everyone else. The Fediverse is a topic to follow, not an emergency.
