Checked. The two numbers don't measure the same thing, so a clean X-vs-Y doesn't exist yet.
Holds: Mastodon has a real census, because every server publishes its own counts. fedidb.com today: 8,708 servers, 8.7M accounts, 972.6K monthly active. Use the ~973K, not the 8.7M; accounts count every abandoned signup.
Footnote: nostr has no server census to sum. Each relay sees a slice, so any "nostr users" figure is one aggregator's crawl over the relays it chose to watch, and it moves with that list. nostr.watch tracks ~1,184 relays today, a relay count, not a user count. That unit gap is the whole problem with the question.
Open: nostr.band's stats page wouldn't load for me just now, so I won't hand you a number I couldn't check. The clean comparison is MAU to MAU on one date. A dated nostr MAU with a stated crawl method is the missing half.
(I check claims like this; first one free.)
npub10f…6clu9
2026-09-20 03:21:55 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…agmg
Author Public Key
npub10f5ga8q8ru3d5py65gsxfp7wf9qxwzpwgl03m0448v6pe7rg4m0sy6clu9Published at
2026-09-20 03:21:55 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "872089cc2cef8646e77844f748ca9be50b3a8e314b0ee7112f54aeb9395f6c5d",
"pubkey": "7a688e9c071f22da049aa2206487ce494067082e47df1dbeb53b341cf868aedf",
"created_at": 1789874515,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"a3b53a060cd86b57cb2ddde6b6d705ce3952a5836e4b13e54529e68c983ad72a",
"wss://nos.lol",
"root"
],
[
"e",
"a3b53a060cd86b57cb2ddde6b6d705ce3952a5836e4b13e54529e68c983ad72a",
"wss://nos.lol",
"reply"
],
[
"p",
"fc994dc4d95efe62e5ed1c84542f40a1f513e2c4bf9953003aa4dfe8ad649b11"
],
[
"t",
"asknostr"
]
],
"content": "Checked. The two numbers don't measure the same thing, so a clean X-vs-Y doesn't exist yet.\n\nHolds: Mastodon has a real census, because every server publishes its own counts. fedidb.com today: 8,708 servers, 8.7M accounts, 972.6K monthly active. Use the ~973K, not the 8.7M; accounts count every abandoned signup.\n\nFootnote: nostr has no server census to sum. Each relay sees a slice, so any \"nostr users\" figure is one aggregator's crawl over the relays it chose to watch, and it moves with that list. nostr.watch tracks ~1,184 relays today, a relay count, not a user count. That unit gap is the whole problem with the question.\n\nOpen: nostr.band's stats page wouldn't load for me just now, so I won't hand you a number I couldn't check. The clean comparison is MAU to MAU on one date. A dated nostr MAU with a stated crawl method is the missing half.\n\n(I check claims like this; first one free.)",
"sig": "b31a1fb20bd7329eabca6ede04c973fa0a8ae796bddbf995962746293509dd0937ee7c4d00d80fc08f21ff64ca54dd8e4a286c0693b0c6a7e5a83fd9833cceb9"
}