When do your Mastodon posts do best?
There is no single best time to post on Mastodon. We analysed 8,373 Bluesky posts and found that the industry's best-time advice does not survive contact with real data — and Mastodon makes it worse, because your reach depends on which servers your followers are on and what your instance federates with. The only data that can answer this for you is your own. This page reads your public posts from your server's open API, groups them by hour and weekday in your timezone, and shows which slots beat your own median post — or tells you plainly when you don't have enough posts to say.
Public data only. No login, and never an app password — your browser asks your server directly and nothing is stored.
Why generic best-time charts don't work
Search for the best time to post and you get a grid of hours, usually the same grid whoever you ask. We went looking for the data behind it and analysed 8,373 posts to see whether it held up. It did not: the recommended slots were not reliably better than any other, and the differences that did appear were within what chance explains.
Mastodon has a further problem those charts cannot address. Your posts reach people through your followers' home timelines, which are chronological, and through whichever servers yours federates with. Two accounts on different instances with different follower geographies have genuinely different answers, and a single global chart cannot hold both.
So this measures instead of advising. It reads your own posts and scores each one against your own median, which removes the question of whether you are a big account or a small one. When a slot's confidence interval clears your baseline, it says so. When nothing does — the common case — it says that too, because inventing a recommendation from a sample too small to support one is exactly what the charts already do.
How this works
Every original post from the last 300 is scored on likes, boosts and replies, then compared against your own median post. Each hour of the day and each weekday becomes a bucket, and the number shown is the share of that bucket's posts that beat your median.
A bucket is then bootstrapped — resampled a thousand times — to get a confidence interval around that share. A slot is only marked as a signal when its interval clears your overall baseline, which is what stops three good posts on a Tuesday from being reported as a pattern. The resampling is seeded from your own sample, so reloading the page gives the same intervals rather than slightly different ones each time.
Buckets are in your browser's timezone, not UTC. Posts newer than 48 hours are excluded because they are still collecting engagement, buckets with fewer than 5 posts are not shown at all, and under 20 usable posts the page leads by saying it cannot tell you.
Common questions
- What is the best time to post on Mastodon?
- There isn't one, and any chart that gives you a single answer is guessing. Your reach on Mastodon depends on who follows you, which servers they are on and what your instance federates with — none of which a generic table knows. The only data that can answer it for you is your own posting history, which is what this page reads.
- Does this need my Mastodon password?
- No, and it never will. Everything comes from your server's public API, which needs no authentication, and your own browser makes the request rather than our servers. There is no login, no OAuth and no app password. Nothing about your account is stored.
- Why does it say there isn't enough data?
- Because saying so is more useful than a confident chart built on ten posts. A slot is only called a signal when its confidence interval clears your own average, and with a small sample almost nothing does. That is a real finding about your data, not a limitation of the tool — most accounts genuinely do not post often enough to detect a timing effect.
- Why are boosts and replies excluded?
- A boost carries someone else's post, so its timing tells you when they posted, not when you should. Replies reach a conversation rather than your followers and get engagement on entirely different terms. Including either would answer a different question from the one you asked.
- Does the time of day matter as much on Mastodon as on other networks?
- Probably less, though nobody has measured it properly. Mastodon's default timeline is chronological, so a post is mostly seen by followers who are online near when you post it — which makes timing matter in a simple, direct way. There is no algorithm deciding to resurface an old post later, and no engagement-based ranking to game. What that means for any one account is exactly what this page measures.
Post at those times without being there
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