It's not that people aren't sticking around Mastodon.
There's more active users now than there were in September. Back then, there were only ~50,000 active users per month on mastodon.social.
It's that a certain segment of registrations were done either in protest, or as a Plan "B" if the Plan "A" (Twitter continues to be a going concern) fails.
That said, if Mastodon is seen merely as a Twitter alternative it will fail.
For the past 30 years, journalists have watched as private equity firms hollowed out storied publications, tech companies plundered and plagiarized their work, and politicians made propagandastic demands.
And though @TexasObserver has always existed precariously, it’s lived on because people who give a damn have donated to it.
Personally, I believe crowdfunding is a way forward for journalism, and @TexasObserver has tapped into something special.
But it's also not entirely @gruber's fault because the media doesn't really talk about the Fediverse, and when they do, it's as a synonym for "Mastodon".
How would @gruber know about the massive development efforts to build more user-friendly alternatives to Mastodon?
No one in the media talks about the growth of *key apps, and how they're now the #2 most used Fediverse platform.
Whenever I tell people that Mastodon isn't the Fediverse, the Mastodon stans start saying, "Oh, you sound like a guy who's complains that Linux isn't called GNU/Linux."
No, there's a massive difference.
To most people, whether you call something Linux or GNU/Linux doesn't affect the user experience of using the OS.
Referring to the Fediverse as "Mastodon" definitely affects the user experience of using Mastodon.
