Mastodon Is Experiencing a Significant Drop in Active Users, Just After Twitter Started Rolling Out Improvements

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Mastodon is experiencing a significant drop in active users since Twitter began rolling out improvements to the platform. Since Mastodon's popularity peaked, its daily active users are down to 1.8 million, from 2.5 million in December.

Interest in Mastodon continues to decline significantly after registering a surge in popularity in December. The platform saw an influx of users after Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter in late October. The first weeks after the ownership change were like a storm, and some users left the platform in protest and signed up for Mastodon.

Before Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon only had 500,000 active users. In November, there were an average of about 130,000 users who signed up to use the platform daily. As of early December, Mastodon had 2.5 million active users, which was a peak, according to PCMag.

Over the past month, Twitter has become more measured, with changes being rolled out gradually and more thoughtfully than before. Musk is committed to making the platform transparent and user-friendly. Be that as it may, Twitter is a much more user-friendly social platform, and the number of active daily users confirms this. This is also likely to be recognized by those who, at the beginning of the Musk journey, left Twitter and switched to Mastodon.

Mastodon had about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January 2023, down 28% from 2.5 million in early December, a dramatic decline, according to data from The Guardian. This downturn highlights the continued strength of Twitter, and that Mastodon is difficult to understand and navigate. As PCMag points out in their guide to using Mastodon, getting started with the platform is the hardest part because it is not always clear where to start. Mastodon allows users to sign up with one of many sites running Mastodon software, called instances. People then communicate with Mastodon users on different instances.

Twitter has 329 million users in 2022, up 13.25% from 2019, according to bankmycell.com. The number of users is expected to increase to 335 million by 2023 and over 340 million by 2024. According to the latest Twitter users report (in Q2 2022), the platform had 237.8 million monetizable daily active users. It is the largest audience Twitter has ever had, up 3.84% from the previous quarter and 77.4% from the first quarter of 2019.

© 2023, Eva Fox | Tesmanian. All rights reserved.

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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts; follow him on Twitter

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