Decline in users Mastodon stops, four times as large as before Twitter takeover

The decline in the number of active users of the decentralized social medium Mastodon has stabilized at 1.3 million. That’s about four times as much as before Elon Musk took over Twitter last fall.

Mastodon peaked at around 2.6 million active users in early December and the number of users has since halved, according to figures that Mastodon itself publishes on its Network Health page https://joinmastodon.org/nl-NL/servers. The number of active users has hardly decreased since the beginning of January.

Presumably many people tried Mastodon in the first few weeks after Elon Musk became CEO following the Twitter acquisition. Mastodon was then considered an alternative to Twitter, because it works with posts just like that commercial network. Mastodon’s design is different, with thousands of different servers worldwide. The number of servers is growing and is now around 10,000. It works with ActivityPub, an open source social media framework.