Lazy Reporters Claiming Fediverse Is ‘Slumping,’ Despite Massive Increase In Usage
There's been this weird series of articles lately, trying to frame the rapid growth of the fediverse (mainly Mastodon), as somehow now failing. It started last month, with the Guardian's Josh Nicholas leaping in with a provocative headline: Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon - but many aren't sticking around" and now Wired has a similar article, by Amanda Hoover, declaring The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump.
The issue, according to both articles, is that because a ton of people signed up to check out Mastodon in November and December as Elon Musk began his program of Musking up Twitter, and not all of them decided to stick around, that proves the site is a failure. Except, that's wrong on so many levels.
Any site getting a big influx of users is going to have some number of them choose not to engage, especially something that's new and different. But if you look at the actual retention rate for the fediverse, it's astoundingly high. Looking at sites that track actual usage of the fediverse, we see that it went up quite a lot in November and December, and while it's dipped in January, it's still way above where it was pre-Musk takeover. Also, it's worth noting that these stats apply to the entire fediverse, and not just Mastodon. While it's common just to talk about Mastodon, the 1.4 million number that people discuss is just those on Mastodon, based on Mastodon's own stats. But, many users move on to compatible platforms that don't end up in that count, like Pleroma, Pixelfed, Misskey, Calckey, and the like. So, the numbers here show a topping off of active users around 4 million, and it currently being around 2.6 million, way, way above the ~600k before Musk's takeover:
I'm not sure how going from 600k to 2.6 million in just a couple of months can be deemed a slump." It sure looks like pretty damn good retention overall. I mean, if we just look at Twitter, there is somewhere around 1.3 billion accounts, but only 368 million active users per month (or, 238 million monetizable daily active users) according to the last numbers pre-Musk. Would anyone say that those numbers prove Twitter was slumping" because somewhere around a billion accounts are inactive on the platform?
Either way, actual usage of the fediverse continues to increase month by month, including through January, meaning that while some people signed up and never used it, those who are using it, are using it more and more. These are the kinds of things you'd think a journalist would cover in these articles, but they're taking the lazy way out and simply looking at the topline number of how many people checked in once or twice and then didn't stick around, while ignoring just how much the platform continues to grow and thrive.
There are plenty of things that the fediverse can do to improve, and the crazy thing is that many of those things are... happening, and happening quickly. Lately, there have been a lot of discussions about making the onboarding process much better, because too many people find it cumbersome. That's fixable. And more and more developers have been moving over to Mastodon, and the launches of tons of new, easier to use clients is an exciting development as well.
Meanwhile, as EFF's Ross Schulman rightly details, the comparisons to just Twitter are similarly misleading, as part of the value of the fediverse is not that it's a Twitter" clone, but that it can provide tons of useful services:
Where we disagree, is that Mastodon (as part of the Fediverse) does offer that in the form of a truly interoperable and portable social media presence. Characterizing Mastodon as a mere Twitter-clone overlooks this strength of the fediverse to be or become any social platform you can imagine. That's the power of protocols. The fediverse as a whole is a micro-blogging site, as well as for sharing photos, videos, book lists and reading updates, and more.
Of course, inertia is always an issue. Getting people to move from one site to another never happens overnight. MySpace was so dominant that Facebook could never overtake it... until it did. Digg was dominant over Reddit. Until it wasn't.
The fediverse might not ever get as big as these other sites, and it doesn't need to. It's already hit critical mass to be an extremely useful site, and the rate of development of new offerings and services to make it more useful over the last couple of months has been eye-opening. But the infatuation by the media with the belief that because it only retained a huge portion, and not all, of the people who jumped over to check it out... seems weird.