A different take: Twitter’s lifeline is its celebrities, and the majority of them have chosen to stay. Combine that with the fact that most people join Twitter to follow those same celebrities and you have your answer. Same thing with Instagram. You literally have the notion of “following” there. They cannot be compared to Reddit where the lifeline is instead those anonymous users who randomly contribute content.

Going to copy paste the response I made when this was posted in a different community:

When the Twitter migration happened, a lot of folks got overenthusiastic about the idea of the fediverse and started setting up their own Mastodon instances, despite having little to no experience with selfhosting before.

A lot of such instances have since shut down as they realised the amount of efforts that actually needs into hosting such a platform, especially instances with open registrations. However, a large number of them did survive and are now thriving.

Has the growth rate slowed? Sure, just like it is expected happen after a sudden influx. But it is false to say that Mastodon growth has stalled. Instead, the phrase I would use is ‘stabilized’. Mastodon growth has stabilized into a healthy level as user growth is now happening more organically. Some stats below:

12,808,214 accounts +217,864 in the last week

Stats on most active instances:

By number of users:
https://i.postimg.cc/fb6FyY89/Screenshot-20230625-121432-Firefox.jpg

By number of posts:
https://i.postimg.cc/cCWbM0y1/Screenshot-20230625-121509-Firefox.jpg

How can anyone look at these numbers and say that the growth has stalled?