Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around

The open-source social network Mastodon grew rapidly during Elon Musk’s initial takeover of Twitter but active users are now steadily declining. Photograph: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/Rex/Shutterstock

The number of active users on the Mastodon social network has dropped more than 30% since the peak and is continuing a slow decline, according to the latest data posted on its website. There were about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January, down from over 2.5 million in early December.

Mastodon, an open-source network of largely independently hosted servers, has often been touted as an alternative to Twitter. And its growth appears connected to controversies at Twitter. But for many it doesn’t fulfil the role that Twitter did and experts say it may be too complicated to really replace it.