Usage of Mastodon has dwindled over the past two months, with monthly active users plummeting to less than 1.4 million after hitting a peak of 2.5 million in December. And that number is official: it comes directly from Mastodon’s public APIs.

Mastodon usage originally exploded in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and his widely-derided mismanagement of the company, surging from 380,000 users to 2.5 million in just two months. But usage fell by over 30 percent in the subsequent month, and now it has fallen even further.

I’ve been using Mastodon since December, but the interaction there is almost non-existent compared to Twitter. It’s not hard to see why: just getting started on Mastodon is a technical challenge and those who maintain Mastodon servers, called instances, are required to pay hosting costs. Twitter, for all its management issues, is free to use and easy to get started. You know, unless you want that stupid blue checkmark.

It’s too early to declare the game over, but my guess is that Mastodon will end up like Linux on the desktop: a product beloved by technical people that failed to meet its original lofty predictions because it was inscrutable to a mainstream audience.

We’ll see. But 1.4 million users is a far cry from the 368 million monthly active users that Twitter claimed at the end of 2022.