How many users does Mastodon have in total? I don't want to sound dismissive, but based on that number it seems like they probably have like a million or so, which is kind of disappointing compared to the size of Twitter…
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-signal-users/signal-sees-...
> Signal was downloaded by 17.8 million users over the past seven days, a 62-fold rise from the prior week, according to data from Sensor Tower. WhatsApp was downloaded by 10.6 million users during the same period, a 17% decline. (January 13, 2021)
(the irony is not lost on me that @elonmusk contributed to the above frenzy: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1347165127036977153 ["Use Signal"])
Granted I did a little bit of work to convince them, but "you can use it on your computer and do video calls with your phone number" was good enough, even if vaguely inaccurate. It's much more functional than SMS.
But that's also in the US, I think other apps are more popular plenty of places which are just as much better than SMS anyway. Signal I think has good adoption in the US because the competitor was so terrible.
> The most common apps chosen as alternatives were Telegram and Signal, mostly because of their privacy and security features. However, almost a third of the participants that tried to switch chose to move to either Facebook Messenger or Instagram.
> 25.97% of participants wanted to switch to other apps but only 0.5% uninstalled WhatsApp ... If we translated this result to the entire population of WhatsApp users (approx. 2 billion), we’d be talking about 500 million users trying to flee from WhatsApp, and only 10k uninstalling it.
In this researcher's own words: "It looks like WhatsApp is the place to chat with anybody, making it particularly hard to leave."
[0] https://medium.com/@carlagriggio/the-great-messaging-app-mig...
For instance I switched to signal and use it regularly, but keep whatsapp on my phone for a few contacts I might need a few times per year. Whether it is uninstalled seems like the wrong metric and does not say anything about signal usage.
Still no match for the 217 Million+ Twitter daily active users I'm afraid after 6 years of existing.
It is not "early days" and anything compared to being 'A viable Twitter alternative' other than Facebook and Instagram has only shown themselves to be a complete failure. Just like how Gab (another alternative) with roughly the same number of active and registered users as Mastodon also failed to be a viable Twitter alternative since that has instead turned into another echo chamber but including the undesirables putting off many users on Twitter from moving.
Mastodon as far positioning itself as being 'A viable Twitter alternative' after 6 years of existence has failed to gain any significant amount of former Twitter users or traction. After 6 years, it isn't early days.
My first impression of mastodon is that it's a lot like the early days of twitter. I kind of miss that era of twitter and am looking forward to moving over to mastodon.