Number of active users of Mastodon has decreased

The number of active users of the federal social network Mastodon has declined. This is evident from figures from the organization. Mastodon had 2.5 million active users a month ago; that is now 1.8 million.

The number of users peaked around the end of November, when the network according to the figures listed under Network Health on JoinMastodon.org reached 2.6 million active monthly users. In the following month it decreased to 1.8 million, where it has been for some time now. That is still much more than the number of users in October, when around 400,000 people logged in to Mastodon every month.

Presumably many people tried Mastodon in the first few weeks after Elon Musk became CEO following the Twitter acquisition. According to The Guardian the number of new users peaked around the moments of controversial decisions. Mastodon was then considered an alternative to Twitter, because it works with posts just like that commercial network. Presumably some of the new users dropped out after that.

Mastodon’s design is different, with thousands of different servers worldwide. The number of servers is still growing and is now around 9800. It works with ActivityPub, an open source framework for social media.