There's a narrative that Mastodon is "losing users". Okay, what do the actual numbers say?

According to this MAU chart, active users has been consistent -- albeit volatile.

Activity is based on how foolish Elon Musk is being at any given moment.

Mastodon usage spikes whenever people perceive Twitter as dying.

Prior to November, there's been spikes. You can actually see this in April/May.

What's different this time is that people are staying.

https://the-federation.info/platform/21

What people don't talk about *enough* is local posts.

For months, this was consistent with a slight incline upwards.

Then at the tail end of December, there's been a big increase.

This implies that while MAU has taken a dip, more users are posting than in November.

In reality, this is more encouraging to me than MAU because it means more people are *posting* instead of merely *lurking*.

But wait! There's more!

Back in November, there were 3,644 Mastodon nodes.

Right now in January, there are 11,732 nodes.

That means Mastodon has grown 3.22x since November when we consider nodes.

By the way, data on the-federation.info is quite conservative.

Other sites, like fediverse.observer, show that MAU continues to rise.

https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats

Two other charts from fediverse party showing Average Mastodon Posts Per Month and Average Mastodon Comments Per Month.

Again, it's an upward trajectory.

Now some people might say, "So what about these stats? Social media is not about metrics!"

And they're right.

However, what's important to me is the *truth*.

Right now, the media is spreading a narrative about Mastodon losing momentum.

The more suitable narrative is that Elon Musk hasn't recently done anything stupid to spur Mastodon sign-ups.

But there's many things that can change: outages, high-profile hacks, mass bannings, etc.