We’re all really into talking about Ello, the new “anti-Facebook” social network that both confuses and excites us. There are plenty of Ello conversations to be had, about the huge LGBTQ community it’s welcomed, about how maybe it’s not all that perfect (VC funding alert!), about how to use the damn thing…

But what we haven’t been able to talk about are numbers. Until now: RJmetrics decided to took all of Ello’s publicly available information (which is… all its information) and created a sample size of about 160,000 users. And from there, we’re getting initial look at Ello activity and performance.

If you want the deep dive, the entire report is embedded below.

Either way, here are a few highlights from the research:

Though sign-ups are tapering off, Ello is still seeing an impressive amount of new users, and activity is very high.

Ello’s current activity isn’t that different from what the early days looked like over on Twitter. In fact, they look better than the early activity of Jelly, once-touted as a “hot new app of the moment.”

Still, there’s some passive usership going on: 36 percent of users have never posted; 18 percent have posted once.

Perhaps most inspiring, Ello’s early numbers are holding well against Instagram’s.



So what does Tristan Handy, the author of the report, actually think of Ello? Like, as a user? “I do like Ello, a lot actually. And maybe I’m the target market. I used Friendster and Myspace when they both started out, and had a Facebook account as soon as it was opened up to non-edu email domains,” he tells me via email. “I really don’t use Facebook anymore—it’s become to productized. Too many viral triggers, notifications, ads. It’s so clear that they’re designing an addictive human behavior (and doing an amazing job of it); I just don’t relish being a part of that any more. I don’t think I’m alone.

“Ello feels like social networking before social networking became a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry, and I liked that. We’ll see whether it stays true to those roots.”