Snippet: The Mastodon Bump is Now a Slump ☇

Amanda Hoover for WIRED:

Companies and politicians joined up. Twitter users put Mastodon usernames in their handles and trumpeted their migration. The new traffic knocked many Mastodon instances, or servers, offline. In less than two months, Mastodon’s monthly active users climbed from 380,000 to more than 2.5 million. But not everyone stuck around.

Mastodon’s active monthly user count dropped to 1.4 million by late January. It now has nearly half a million fewer total registered users than at the start of the year. Many newcomers have complained that Mastodon is hard to use. Some have returned to the devilish bird they knew: Twitter.

When I initially tried Mastodon, it didn’t quite click for me, but after trying different client apps and finding more people, I’ve stuck around. I’m sure there are plenty of people who have tried it, but haven’t been able to use it as a replacement for Twitter and that’s fine. Despite trying to give Hoover the benefit of the doubt, it seems like there’s a growing narrative by a lot of media outlets that since Mastodon isn’t setting the world on fire with user numbers, it’s a failure and we should all just go back to Twitter. How about we focus on quality of the experience and if this new federated model for social media is worth expanding rather than caring solely about growth?