Mastodon, which was once seen as the most viable Twitter alternative, has fallen out of favor lately. After peaking in November 2022, when traffic to the platform exploded by nearly 600 percent, it has tumbled badly. A recent study by Uswitch.com reveals that Mastodon’s popularity has dropped about 84 percent from its peak. BeReal, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok have also seen less interest in recent months. Instagram, Snapchat, and Telegram are among the social media platforms with growing popularity.
Mastodon drops in popularity after peaking during Twitter’s chaos
According to the new report, Mastodon amassed over four million searches in November last year. The open-source microblogging platform benefitted from Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter in October. Musk announced several unpopular changes and also fired thousands of workers without notice. Angered by this, many Twitter users decided to quit the platform and started looking for alternatives. Mastodon emerged as the biggest name, with it gaining over 70,000 new users on the day Musk completed his Twitter takeover.
However, the chaos at Twitter gradually settled down, and it affected Mastodon’s popularity. In June 2023, it saw only 673,000 searches, an 83% drop from its peak. While it isn’t completely out of the game just yet, with searches seeing healthy growth from 450,000 in May 2023, Mastodon appears to be past its peak for once and all. The arrival of Meta’s Threads earlier this month has made things more difficult for the emerging social media platform. Threads is now seen as the real competitor for Twitter.
Since Threads is less than a month old, this study doesn’t evaluate its popularity, which has dropped a little after peaking in the first week of launch. The social media app that has seen the next worst drop in popularity after Mastodon is BeReal. Searches for this platform have declined almost 70 percent between October 2022 and June 2023. Launched in 2020, BeReal encourages users to share photos of their “real” selves rather than edited or filtered photos.
Bluesky, Discord, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and WhatsApp are other social media platforms that have experienced a drop in searches in recent months. On the other hand, searches for Facebook Lite, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Telegram peaked last month. Interestingly, a separate study recently showed that Americans are desperately looking to delete Instagram from their devices. So this study may not tell you the full story of a platform’s popularity. But no one can deny that Mastodon and BeReal are gradually falling out of favor.
