Misskey and the Japanese fediverse
Misskey and the Japanese side of the fediverse continue to grow and be its own thing. An update on Misskey incorporating, and misskey.io restricting signups to Japan.
People have remarked that all the changes at Twitter/X the era of a single global platform that influences discourse signal is over. The expectation is that people will not flock towards a single app that will replace Twitter for everyone. Instead, people will go towards many different platforms that serve different purposes, and different groups of people. One example of this is Misskey, the second largest platform on the fediverse, with over 600k registered users. Misskey is a microblogging platform that was started in 2014 by Japanese software engineer syuilo. Syuilo is still the main developer of Misskey. The platform has always largely catered towards a Japanese audience, and recent developments that cemented that even further.
Misskey, and especially the flagship server misskey.io, has seen rapid growth recently, more than doubling from 180k accounts in July to 370k a month later. Part of this seems to be a response to Twitter renaming itself to X, on that day the server grew by 20k accounts. This growth has put strain on the server admins, both from a technical as well as administrative perspective. A few weeks ago, the misskey.io administrators added a new rule to prevent Europeans from registering an account, due to uncertainty if they would be GDPR compliant, and a lack of local knowledge on how to approach this. Last week, they’ve restricted signups even further to only people from Japan. This is because of the continued growth moderation has not been able to keep up with the inflow of people.
Misskey has also set further steps towards professionalisation, and formed itself into a company, MisskeyHQ, Nikkei Asia reports. They report that Misskey currently brings in tens of thousands of dollars in donations. Yoshiki Eto, one of the administrators of misskey.io says that they do not know if this source of money will continue into the future, and that they do not want to rely on advertisements too much. Misskey allows for advertisements to be shown. MisskeyHQ will aim to make money by providing software for others to host Misskey servers, as well as via merchandise. Nikkei Asia also reports that Eiji Shinoda, syuilo, will join the company as a director. A comment by syuilo seems to contradict this, where she states “Misskey (as you know) doesn't make much money, so I don't have any plans to join the company”. I reached out for clarification, but have not gotten a response. Meanwhile, other posts make by syuilo with new features and changes to Misskey make it clear that she keeps working on the software.
Finally, Misskey might be big in the Japanese fediverse, but Mastodon certainly has it's place as well. NERV is a popular app in Japan that warns for natural disasters. They announced this week that they will not post on their X account with 1.9M followers anymore, and instead will only post updates to their app and their Mastodon server.
