One month in, App.net has 20,000 active users, with 250 of them accounting for half the posts

App.net, the subscription-based, ad-free Twitter alternative that is now fully funded and ready for extensive testing (you can find TNW’s profile here), is off to a relatively sluggish start.

Diego Basch, currently ‘in between jobs’ after selling his company IndexTank to LinkedIn and briefly serving as the company’s engineering director, has compiled some initial stats, one month in (via Hacker News).

Turns out App.net currently has approximately 20,000 users, of which a small minority seemingly dominates the conversation: Basch estimates that 250 users (1.25 percent) have so far accounted for half the posts.

To put things in perspective: App.net surpassed its funding target ($500,000) by raising $803,000 from 12,315 backers – which means a lot more people signed up for the service after the highly visible fundraising period.

To date, App.net users have generated a little over 300,000 posts so far, although we should note a bunch of those are automated cross-posts from Twitter.

The average post length is about 100 characters.

As Basch points out, there’s already a decent amount of applications supporting App.net, as many of the early users are developers themselves.

We’ve covered a few of them (namely the first Android app and the first iOS app, as well as the dedicated IFTTT channel), but apparently quickApp is the most popular after the App.net Alpha Web service.

A post on App.net is similar to a tweet, but users can post messages with up to 256 characters instead of 140 characters like Twitter.

Interesting stats for sure: 20,000 users is really not that bad for a fledgling service you need to pay for. It would be foolish to expect tens of thousands of people flocking to a new service that – let’s be honest – doesn’t solve a problem that hasn’t been tackled before. At least not yet.

However, I would have expected that the majority of the activity would come from far more users than the 250 users that account for half the posts to date.

It is, of course, early days and App.net is in ongoing development, so perhaps the percentage of active users will steadily increase in the future as it grows.

Or not.

Also read: Will App.net be the connective tissue founders & developers can rely on?

Image Credit / TPM