Mastodon Didn't Replace Twitter...

Last week I posted some numbers about Twitter's growth that caused a small rumble on Twitter. That whole thing made me think about everyone who left Twitter for Mastodon and I wanted to see if that trend is still going.

It isn't.

Since launching in mid 2021, Mastodon's own app was downloaded a little over 4M times from the App Store and Google Play, according to our estimates. The App Store led by a bit, but overall the downloads were fairly even.

Before Twitter became news, the Mastodon app was seeing a couple hundreds downloads a day, on average. When Elon took over downloads rose sharply and into the tens of thousands just to jump into the hundreds of thousands a few days later.

At its peak, back in November of 2022, the Mastodon app was downloaded 338K times across the App Store and Google Play. That's quite a few, but the joy was short-lived. Downloads dropped below the 100K line within two days and continued to drop into the single-digit thousands a few days later.

The trend continued to slow down in 2023 and as of this week, daily downloads are averaging 1,700. Higher than where it started, but not high enough to suggest it's the future.

Two things before you start telling me I'm wrong - the first is that Mastodon isn't the only client for Mastodon, it's just the official one. I know that. I also know the downloads of the others and they're low enough that they woudn't change this chart. The second is that I'm not trying to hate on Mastodon here at all.

I think beating Twitter at being Twitter isn't easy. Beating Instagram at Instagram isn't easy either, and the same can be said about any established platform these days. Mastodon was a clunkier, more complicated, and less cohesive version of Twitter - not a replacement.

Beating Elon will require building something else, better, different, new. In a way, I'm pretty sure that what X intends to be...