According to the latest figures published by the Mastodon website, its active user count is down 30% from its recent peak and continues to decline slowly. There were about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January, down from 2.5 million in early December, the data showed.

Mastodon is a decentralized social platform that serves as an open-source alternative to Twitter. Sites based on Mastodon are called “instances”, and these instances can be hosted on different independent servers, which are both independent and related to each other (because users of different sites can communicate without hindrance).

Mastodon’s explosive growth is closely related to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Before Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon had about 500,000 active users. After Musk’s series of controversial operations (such as a large number of layoffs, changes to Twitter’s verification policy, etc.), Mastodon poured in a large number of users in November, adding more than 130,000 new users per day at the peak. It had 2.5 million active users by early December, but dropped to 1.8 million by January.

While Mastodon is billed as a Twitter replacement, it doesn’t do what Twitter does, and experts say it may be too complicated to actually replace Twitter.Moreover, the Mastodon product itself has certain usage thresholds, even npm co-founder Laurie Voss also tweetedComplain about Mastodonclaiming to have spent 7 hours trying to set up a Mastodon instance on the server.

So many users who migrated from Twitter to Mastodon may find it too difficult or not suitable for them, and they may return to Twitter, or give up using the social network altogether.