I honestly don't think this is too surprising. When a new thing is created that piques peoples interest they may create an account to try it out. A percentage of them will use it daily, some weekly and some will loose interest when it does not meet their expectations. De-provisioning or canceling accounts takes effort and walking away takes zero effort.

I expect a similar pattern with all the AI type services that are popping up. People will create accounts to try it out and the active accounts will plateau. Some percentage of accounts will stagnate as very few systems remove inactive accounts in the hope the person returns and becomes a contributing patron.

Is there any interesting traffic stats from Mastodon?

It's a shame that Mastodon never took off or retained users even after twitter was taken over.

I argue that as soon as people were tasked to 'choose a server' that was an instant 98% drop-off and stuck on Twitter.

afaik, that's by design. It's more like BBS'ing where people in the know can find a cool place to hangout that's not overrun by the rest of the planet. Like a beach without annoying tourists.

That means the majority of users to such platforms are tech people, which isn't really inclusive, helpful or an easy to user alternative to Twitter.

Sounds like a failure by design no?

I wonder how many dead accounts are because people switched instances or because instances closed down?

I don't even care about this slight slump. For me it is still a much better experience on Mastodon, more engagement and more meaningful conversations and information. All this despite having much smaller number of people which I follow and who follow me. Just in general a lot more pleasant experience on mastodon. Quality over quantity, actually a real social network and not some propaganda/advertisement network that both Twitter and Facebook have become.