The number of active users on Mastodon has been steadily declining since the peak. According to one report, activity has fallen by more than 30 percent. While 2.5 million users were said to be active at the beginning of December, it was only 1.8 million in the past week, according to The Guardian, with reference to statistics from Mastodon itself.
The right place in the social network
The alternative short message service consists of several so-called instances and requires some training to create an account and find other users who can be distributed across different instances. According to social media expert Meg Coffey, the central Twitter is easy to use. Open the Twitter app or website, “type in a few words and that’s it”. Coffey compares Twitter to a simple SMS platform.
Coffey be The Guardians a big fan of muting and blocking, says Twitter is “a wonderful place” for her. However, she can understand people who are looking for a less toxic and hurtful place.
The Raspberry Pi makers also found out last December that Mastodon is not necessarily the right place for those looking for harmony. It was all about an employee who previously worked as a police officer and called conspirators on Mastodon. It is not the network and its structure that make a place, but the users.
Mastodon largely unknown in Germany
Before Elon Musk finally took over Twitter after initial quarrels at the end of October 2022, Mastodon had “only” 500,000 users. In mid-November, around 2 million Mastodon accounts had already been created and at the peak 130,000 new users were added every day. To the “Mastodon Users” account according to – a bot that claims to include all known instances – there are currently over 9 million user accounts on Mastodon.
According to the market and opinion research institute YouGov, 80 percent of those surveyed in Germany over the age of 18 had never heard of Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter by October 2022. According to this, around 16 to 18 percent of Germans between the ages of 18 and 44 have an account on Mastodon – awareness of the decentralized short message service was highest in this age group. But even among the up to 44-year-olds, between 62 and 71 percent stated that they had never heard of Mastodon.
(bme)
