[carbonatedmilk]

For comparison, the old, dying, 'legacy' social media platform Facebook added 24MILLION new users in the same period. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

To rub it in - If Facebook & Mastodon were the only two social networks to 'switch' to, FB captured 99.8% of the 'switchers'. If 24 Million new users had signed up for Mastodon, that would be a story. That only 0.2% of them chose Mastadon shows how bad the open, federated alternative really is.

[Kadin]

> Facebook added 24MILLION new users in the same period

Of those 24M users, how many of them are people I care about or want to follow? I.e. not bots, not people on the other side of the planet, not people who don't have a language in common with me, etc. etc.

A network with 10,000 users, 10% of whom are interesting enough for me to want to follow, is much better than a network with 1M users but only 0.1% are people I'd care to interact with.

[411111111111111]

No, it doesn't show that it's bad. It only shows that basically nobody knows that they exist, which is basically a death sentence for social networks.

Nonetheless, the distinction makes sense as otherwise you're just opening the doors to endless discussions about what is "better".

[memish]

To add to that, how many did Twitter gain in that same period?

There are people whose follower counts increased dramatically, which would suggest there was a large influx there too.