I am sure not the first one to take a break or stop using Mastodon! There is almost 10 million users registered, but only 1.4 million users are active per month. In other words there are 8.6 million other users “on a break”!
Sadly, the numbers of active users have also been steadily declining so far this year. Cool clients have been made available for both Mac and iOS, I even bought a subscription to Ivory for iPhone. But technology is not the most important here, users are, and they are missing…
I have followed many interesting people from Norway and Denmark, and some from other countries, but I lack a lot of people that I followed on Twitter. Most of them were related to work and some to my hobbies. In that way, Mastodon could not really replace Twitter. Having said that, I am not going back to Twitter. A lot of people that I followed, have also left Twitter. They just didn’t sign up for Mastodon or tried Mastodon, and found it not something for them.
I will check back on Mastodon, and my account will be kept. But for me to reconsider the service, more people from IT and from academy must join. Hopefully also some politicians and journalists. Some cool things are happening, for instance in the Netherlands. SURF and Universities of the Netherlands are jointly exploring Mastodon as an open source platform for education and research in the Netherlands. The pilot has just started, and hopefully it will be a success and a way other universities will join Mastodon with their researchers and students. We can only hope!
