Some reports estimate that around 1M people have left #twitter in the last weeks https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/03/1062752/twitter-may-have-lost-more-than-a-million-users-since-elon-musk-took-over/. At the same time #mastodon has grown in 860k users since Nov 4th. Here is the plot of the number of users in the #mastodon instances at http://instances.social in the last months.
@estebanmoro Didn't those numbers include banned accounts/bots though?
@obi I think they are separated numbers. Here is the text in the report mentioned: "The firm Bot Sentinel, which tracks inauthentic behavior on Twitter by analyzing more than 3.1 million accounts and their activity daily, believes that around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1. That’s more than double the usual number."
@estebanmoro I will take a look at that. I read an article the other day and the numbers seemed to be more like 400k people leaving. Not that it matters, it's a lot. Although it's not a lot in relation to total user base.
@estebanmoro Never thought about it like that. Good point. Will be hard to find that data point though, I guess. Since Twitter activity is at record highs right now. Have to wait for the storm to pass and revisit.
@obi Good point. I guess the important thing is the "who". If users that left Twitter are the ones that create most of the content (1%) then it could be a massive migration of content to other platforms