Twitter Attracts Users While Mastodon Loses Thousands Daily
Published: February 11, 2023
Mastodon is experiencing a significant drop in active users while Twitter is attracting more. Since Mastodon's popularity peaked at 2.5 million daily active users in early December, this number has dropped to 1.4 million in two months.
Interest in Mastodon continues to decline significantly after registering a surge in popularity in December. The platform saw an influx of users after Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter in late October. The first weeks after the ownership change were like a storm, and some users left the platform in protest and signed up for Mastodon.Before Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon only had 500,000 active daily users. In November, there were an average of about 130,000 users who signed up to use the platform daily. As of early December, Mastodon had 2.5 million active users, which was a peak, according to PCMag.However, since then, the number of Mastodon users has continued to decline significantly. Monthly active users have dropped to less than 1.4 million after peaking at 2.5 million in early December. In early January, Mastodon had 1.8 million users, which means that over the next four weeks, the platform registered a churn of around 400,000 users. Thus, on average, about 12,900 users stopped using Mastodon daily in January.Over the past two months, Twitter has become more measured, with changes being rolled out gradually and more thoughtfully than before. Musk is committed to making the platform transparent and user-friendly. Be that as it may, Twitter is a much more user-friendly social platform, and the number of active daily users confirms this. This is also likely to be recognized by those who, at the beginning of the Musk journey, left Twitter and switched to Mastodon.This downturn in Mastodon highlights the continued strength of Twitter, and that Mastodon is difficult to understand and navigate. As PCMag points out in their guide to using Mastodon, getting started with the platform is the hardest part because it is not always clear where to start. Mastodon allows users to sign up with one of many sites running Mastodon software, called instances. People then communicate with Mastodon users on different instances.Twitter has 329 million users in 2022, up 13.25% from 2019, according to bankmycell.com. The number of users is expected to increase to 335 million by 2023 and over 340 million by 2024. According to the latest Twitter users report (in Q2 2022), the platform had 237.8 million monetizable daily active users. It is the largest audience Twitter has ever had, up 3.84% from the previous quarter and 77.4% from the first quarter of 2019.
Source: Re-posted and Summarized from Eva Fox at tesmanian.com.
