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# Why does this chart just go down?
- URL: https://birchtree.me/blog/why-does-this-chart-just-go-down/
- Published: 2026-10-14T19:15:13.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-14T19:15:13.000Z
- Author: Matt Birchler
- Tags: Links

M.G. Siegler: [Twitter is Back. Shhh… Magic Dance!](https://spyglass.org/x-gon-give-it-to-ya/?ref=birchtree.me)

> But it's also not really a surge in usage, and certainly not on the business side – it's more just a vibes-based resurgence. For weeks now, people have been talking about coming back – [Federico Viticci of MacStories](https://ticci.craft.me/explanation?ref=birchtree.me) wrote about his return a couple months ago, and [Casey Newton of Platformer](https://www.platformer.news/does-intelligence-need-a-hard-cap/?ref=birchtree.me) more recently. Both did so sheepishly because their stances are clearly that while they'd prefer not to use X, the realities of their businesses dictate that they should if not must. Over the weekend, John Gruber of Daring Fireball gave a more full-throated endorsement of the X comeback

I don't post on X because I just don't feel great about it, but as I've written before, I understand why others would feel differently, and I don't think they're social pariahs for doing so. And to be clear, this is not a post where I announce I'm posting on X again as well. I actually don't want to talk about X at all, I want to talk about Mastodon.

Below is a chart looking at the active users each month on Mastodon since September 2022 (data derived from [Mastodon's statistics API](https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics?ref=birchtree.me), discovered via [Mastodon Analytics](https://mastodon-analytics.com/?ref=birchtree.me)).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/10/Pastry-2026-10-14-at-11.12.27-AM.png)

There's some interesting data here, but at a high level, you see a social network that gained over 2 million new active users in the 31 days after Musk closed on buying Twitter. A lot of those users bounced and we dropped to about 1.1 million active users by the following summer, when we saw a second spike as Twitter started to require logins to see anything and that rate limits were being applied. Since then, we've seen a slow but steady decline in number of people using Mastodon.

Looking at September 30, 2022, the first day in the official dataset, and one month before many of us started using Mastodon, there were 3.6M accounts, and 470K of them were active, so 13%. Since then, the total number of accounts has risen 192% to 10.5M, but the active user number has only jumped 56%. Put another way, of the 7 million people who signed up for Mastodon since Musk took over Twitter, about 3-5% of them are still using it today (10% if we assume every single person using Mastodon pre-Twitter exodus has quit). Meanwhile, the gap gets bigger every month as more people sign up, but fewer people use the service.

As a fan of Mastodon, these numbers are hard to look at. Not because I think a social network must have hundreds of millions of users to be valuable, but because it paints a picture where many people have tried Mastodon, but almost none of them stick around. Also, while infinite growth isn't a requirement, constant decline isn't what you want to see in a social network either.

I also don't know what the normal number of people who sign up for a social network and stick around is. However, estimates have X's monthly active users at [around 557 million today](https://www.demandsage.com/twitter-statistics/?ref=birchtree.me), and for them to hit the 5% retention rate I see on Mastodon, literally every human being on Earth (8.3 billion) would need to have created an account…and 3 billion of them would have had to create a second account.

I bring all this up because when well known individuals make a choice to post on X again, or to leave Mastodon, we hear about it and it becomes The Discourse for a bit. I think the more worrying thing is that these are not outliers, they're doing the same thing 90% (or more!) of people who join Mastodon do. What makes Mastodon a place most people come to and go, "no thanks"?

Answering this question is key if you, like me, want Mastodon to thrive. I've gone all in on ActivityPub and have tried to get as many people as I can to join Mastodon. I've federated this blog, I maintain a [custom Mastodon web UI](https://github.com/mattbirchler/Tangerine-Neue-for-Mastodon?ref=birchtree.me), I make [Best-o-Masto](https://bestomasto.com/?ref=birchtree.me) which tries to make Mastodon easier to keep up with for those who can't spend much time on social media everyday, I subscribe to several apps that make using Mastodon better, and I've donated to the foundation several times over the years. I mention all this to make clear that I'm not a Mastodon hater, I'm a lover who doesn't want it to wither away.

Forget everything about how other social networks are bad, what makes it so that almost everyone who joins Mastodon gives up on it? I don't have easy answers (although I have some ideas, maybe for another post), I mostly wanted to write this to get my fellow Mastodon users thinking. Are we happy being an ever-shrinking niche social network? If we are, then how can we be mad at everyone who chooses to use something else? If we aren't, then how can we make this place something more people want to spend time on?

*Disclaimer: some of these accounts are surely bots, or second or third accounts set up by the same person, so it's possible retention is a bit higher than the percentages calculated above. I can just work with the data I have, but regardless of that metric, the downward use trend holds regardless and is the ultimate problem.*