[posguy]

Does it matter whether the aggregate Mastodon user count ever catches up to Twitter? Is Twitter today actually better for its users than the Twitter of yesteryear that only had ~17 million tweets per day?

I have met many people on the fediverse, and at least two friends of mine have moved thousands of miles due to relationships and opportunities that likely would not have occured if the fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc) and its variety of platforms and userbase did not congregate in this manner.

One friend even bummed a plane ride on a tiny general aviation plane by serendipitous happenstance through the fediverse to make the multi-state move out of an abusive living situation.

Unbounded growth is not always good, and many fediverse instances have limited or closed new account registrations to ensure their community doesn't become the next Voat, FreeSpeechExtremist (which I was banned from for fairly benign speech) or /r/TheDonald.

[sillysaurusx]

I agree in spirit, but a community that isn’t growing is probably dead.

[rusk]

Growth Hacking is a thing. Whether that counts as real growth or not I don’t know. But metrics can become suspect when they become a target.

There are quite a number of people using Mastodon and it is quite nice but it does feel a bit echoey all the same. At the same time there is a lot of garbage on twitter that you really couldn’t call “active users” and keep a straight face. As usual e truth is usually somewhere in the middle ...