Friends, I’m minorly concerned about the Fediverse. It is true that MAU has been declining month over month. And there hasn’t really been much movement on improvement plans, near as I can tell.
I don’t think it’ll disappear, but it are seems like it needs an infusion of cash/interest to get out of the rut.
And to the idea that it can just get on as is, I say bunk. Social networks of any kind need new people coming in, or you just have an elaborate private club.
So I will say there are new people that I’ve seen come in as a result of Twitter and Grok issues in January 2026. Pulling up MAU stats as recorded by fedidb, this month (1,013,793) is about the same as April 2024 (1,041,368), although if downward trends hold that becomes problematic for general health.
Among the discourse about MAU in the fediverse I think Stefan and others make a good point that Bluesky which has had a great deal of capital and development resources has seen similar dropoffs of ~1,800,000 users who liked something daily in March 2025 to 1,100,000 today:
Cash and developers would help immensely as crowdfunding efforts like Bonfire barely scraped by in their IndieGoGo… but I don’t think cash alone is the issue to declining active users.
There are new users coming in, and certain Japanese instances remain flat like MissKeyIO and Famichiki due to new users balancing out natural attrition. One thing I think to keep an eye out is how Loops, a fedi TikTok equivalent in beta performs. With how various platforms like Youtube and Instagram are chasing the short video format, and how popular TikTok is it could be that maybe that’s the format that people find most engaging and once there’s enough Loops users to make Loops naturally draw in users, the fediverse will start to see interesting things around growth. Purely speculative though as I’m not a social network expert
I appreciate the optimism, but personally I see no reason to believe that “this time” will be the one that makes normal users consider Fedi options. I really want to be wrong about that, but even Loops, slick as it is, I don’t think has the juice to move people from TikTok.
Good points on Bluesky’s performance, and I intentionally do not want to make this a Fedi-vs-ATmosphere thing—at least for userbase. We can have the DX conversation, but that’s not directly relevant to usage.
To see Jerry talk about attrition at increased rates, given i.e.'s scale and ostensibly dedicated userbase, is alarming.
But maybe the real story is that social media writ large is dying.
Threads claims massive growth, but I have deep suspicion about those numbers, both what they count as a user and how many accounts are humans.
In the years I’ve been using it, the fediverse, at large across a variety of different software I have found that there’s a few core issues.
The server you choose will limit your experience, ioc.exchange and similar don’t see the same content and material as other instances, that are outside of ‘computer security’. But that content also is niche, in the sense that it is people microblogging and rightfully so don’t desire to entertain some of the folk in the ‘computer’ world.
It’s difficult, to find locally relevant material there are about three users in my metro area and even geographically there are very few accounts in my area.
I did happen to meet one in person and we go to lunch every few months.
There are a few syndicates that also post to a federated channel and I follow that, but the number of followers is also exceptionally low compared to channels like Meta.
I think loops is a neat idea but I think that the creator has been identified as being problematic at large, maybe this has changed I am not current on the discourse around ‘Dansup’.
I have enjoyed that on wafrn one can see bluesky and mastodon posts, without having to manage a bridge ( I have zero desire to manage a bridge, ever. Infrastructure is time consuming and expensive)
What I feel is that there’s too many options that are not clear until you are committed to something, and then realize you have made a material choice that has unintended consequences, signing up for instances takes -time-, which is not the experience when you use and commercial at large siloed social media. I.e. I joined ioc exchange, but I did not understand then in 2022 what I wanted, more community posts and microblogging.
The fediverse at large is overwhelmingly white, and concentrated users in the global north, it also lacks diversity.
The fediverse’s baked in configurations includes a range of sociotechnical elements, including licensing. This affords technically minded users the ability to modify and install fediverse software that runs on an open source protocol to communicate with other instances.
Pair that with Content moderation is a key form of labor on social media, administrators are charged with the act of listing which has three unique constraints: lists don’t carry their own selection criteria, lists are binary, they can grow.
Additionally there is no assurance that a given instance won’t be run in the same manner as Meta, or X, where data generated by users is sold to advertising agents.
That’s not to say good things cannot happen, and that things can change but I think a honest reflection of how the fediverse has a slew of cultural problems that are probably ossifying, and perhaps what that looks like is what we are seeing at present.
I also think that there is this risk about the fediverse too. The risk that a user can post information that could get the instance subpoenaed.
The risk of classes of speech that can become eligible to be subpoenaed, which can violate the privacy that was.
On the Mastodon side of Fedi, note that there is a Discovery Week coming up May 11-15, with community roundtable discussions planned for each of those days. The idea is to get input for UI and UX improvements in the Mastodon 5.0 release this year.
The topics for each day are:
It may be worth contributing if you can!
