The number of active Mastodon users — those who've logged in in the last 30 days — has fallen to 1.8 million from a high of 2.6 million. This reflects the fact that while there's a wave of new users after each Musk tantrum, the majority aren't sticking around. Even the 1.8M figure is inflated by new accounts, so I expect a further drop.
Still, the number of active users is over 4 times what it used to be before the Twitter takeover.
Source: https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics (and Wayback machine).
@randomwalker
As someone else mentioned, many of those could be people migrating between instances. I created accounts on four different servers and prefer the one that I'm posting this from, but I do occasionally use the others.
That said, it isn't necessarily a bad thing if some people try this out and then decide to leave. I'm thinking of people who really want their posts to go viral. Some people who desire that may post controversial takes just to get a reaction. I prefer more thoughtful discourse, so I really am enjoying this form of social media. I spend more time on here than reddit or Facebook. (I never used Twitter much, though I had an account from the early days.)
I would love to see more institutional adoption of fediverse servers, though.
