Some of the people who switched toMastodonfollowing Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter buyout have gone back to the social network, according to a new report. That fact’s highlighted by the number of active users currently on Mastodon.
With Musk making changes to Twitter that some didn’t like, including the removal of third-party app access via a free API, Mastodon saw a huge spike in users. But it’s now reported that those users are going back to Twitter in droves because they find Mastodon too difficult to use.
Wiredreports that Mastodon’s number of active users has fallen by more than one million of late, having sat at more than 2.5 million at one point. Prior to the spike, there were just 380,000 people actively using the federated social network.
As of late January, that number sat at around 1.4 million. What’s more, Mastodon “now has nearly half a million fewer total registered users than at the start of the year,” the report claims.
However, while some users have made the decision to go back to Twitter, it’s clear that not everyone has and Mastodon continues to ride a wave of popularity the likes of which don’t come along very often. That popularity has seen server admins pull out all the stops to ensure the service remains stable for those now using it. Wired reports that one Mastodon server admin saw their 100-user server try to deal with around 120,000 users at one point in November. That number has now fallen to less than 50,000.
What makes Mastodon so interesting to some is the fact that there are no centralised servers owned by a company, as is the case at Twitter, Facebook, and other major social networks. Instead, multiple servers are run by anyone from companies to individuals and they all connect together. It’s kind of what the Internet was intended to be all those years ago, but it does add complexity.
Judging by Wired’s report, that complexity has already seen more than a few people jump ship to the devil they already know back at Twitter.
