App.net’s Baby Steps: 250,000 Posts, 17,500 Users

App.net, the pay-based Twitter alternative that just opened a few weeks ago, has hit its first couple activity milestones.

Founder Dalton Caldwell posted today that the service has surpassed 250,000 posts, and he estimates that about half of those are coming from third-party clients. Caldwell calls the latter stat “a good sign” — App.net was born, in part, out of frustration over Twitter’s changing relationship with developers (and out of the desire for an ad-free service).

Earlier this week, Caldwell also announced that App.net had surpassed 17,500 accounts. The service was inundated with new signups when it began public crowdfunding in mid-August, and it took several days for many new accounts to be activated and billed. In the comments of his announcement, Caldwell says that everyone who paid for an account now has access to the service, and cautioned that App.net “is nowhere near ready for mainstream adoption.”

Despite the activity so far — 250,000 posts from 17,500 accounts comes out to about 14 posts per user, which is fairly impressive in such a short period of time — a look at Appnetstats.com shows that the service really is still in its infancy. There’s been, for example, only about 1,200 posts on App.net so far today (as of about 12:00 pm PT).

One recent development that should increase activity on App.net is the launch this week of an App.net channel on IFTTT.com, the social automation service. That’s making it easier for App.net users to post to/from other social accounts (i.e., Twitter), get notified when they have new App.net followers and do other things that aren’t yet built in on the App.net service itself.