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This is only Mastodon, not the other softwares. That's why you often see such differing numbers. There are just too many different softwares in the federation to accurately tally users.
There's already a bot that does this.

https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount

People frequently have multiple accounts on different servers, so the account count is much larger than the number of individuals. Although this was of course true for Twitter as well, I had 3 different Twitter accounts. Which reminds me, I need to change my game accounts that use Twitter for account recovery over to something else before Twitter goes twits-up...

There's also https://fediverse.observer/stats which found my experimental single-user GoToSocial instance within a few hours automatically.
Found my single-user Pleroma and my experimental GoToSocial but hasn't found my Honk.
I had to google to make sure these were real and not some sort of tongue-in-cheek comment.
Even better, I like the breakdown by application.
Where does this “instances.social” get their list from? Does mastodon phone home to record new instances or something?
Every problem that people say Twitter has, Mastodon seems to have but worse.

From the cliques, to arbitrary bans, to servers shutting down (the server I considered joining asked that you autodelete old tweets to save space), to worse UX.

I can’t even think of a thing it does better than Twitter except for, I suppose, acting as a self hosted Twitter, whoever finds that useful.

It’s like Twitter with the politics of Reddit mods and subreddits.