Seeing reporting that Mastodon has reached 15 million user accounts, but this is wholly incorrect.

My own crawler shows that from 11,478 instances the total number is 8.46 million accounts.

FediDB shows from 11,242 instances the total number is 7.31 million.

Fediverse Observer shows from 10,551 instances the total number is 9.07 million.

libera.site shows 12,669 instances and 8.77 million.

The official Join Mastodon API shows 9,724 instances and 8.59 million.

Why the variance? Because, decentralized network. 🤷

Across all five data sources it's approximately 11,133 active instances and 8.44 million accounts.

Not 15 million.