With 2.5 million users, has Mastodon really become a Twitter rival?

The daily dose of 'drama' that Elon Musk provides at Twitter does the business of its small competitor Mastodon. This decentralized platform welcomes thousands of users every day, and has just passed 2.5 million active users (which is 8 times more than before Twitter's acquisition by Musk).

With many controversial decisions—the Twitter Blue fiasco, the massive layoffs, Trump and several far-right accounts reinstated, the recent suspended journalists, the @ElonJet account banned, the (now-reversed) ban on sharing links to other social media platforms, etc.—many users are looking for another social media platform. And besides Hive and Tumblr, it seems that Mastodon has been one of the preferred platforms for users to move to.

In a blog post, Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko says: “This is a stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say while holding your social graph hostage. At Mastodon, we believe that there doesn’t have to be a middleman between you and your audience and that journalists and government institutions especially should not have to rely on a private platform to reach the public.”

But even with these numbers in mind, is Mastodon really a good and viable alternative to X Well, Mastodon operates over a decentralized collection of independent servers, making it akin to email, but for social media, so it's safe to say that being taken over by one person like Twitter is a pretty unlikely scenario. Moreover, Mastodon is free and open source, it doesn't show any ads, and the feed is chronological (there is no algorithm), so it's something that is greatly valued by users and that goes in the opposite direction of Twitter.

On the other hand, multiplying by 8 its number of monthly users is a huge achievement, but presenting them as monthly active users seems premature. Why? Because signing up millions of users on alternative platforms to Twitter, in light of the mess caused by Musk, is completely normal behavior in times of crisis. Even if the growth keeps going in December, what about January, February, or March? Of the new users who signed up in November, how many have only been there once? These questions are especially important since Mastodon is not the only alternative to Twitter.

Another point to consider: Twitter was claiming more than 217 million daily active users last November, so the 2.5 million Mastodon users seem very low compared to that. So, is the buzz around Mastodon completely fake? There is clearly a bubble effect that makes some Twitter users think that this is a credible alternative to Elon Musk's social network. Maybe Mastodon will become one in time, but there is still a long way to go.