To quote Life of Brian,
Splitters!
…assuming of course these are people who left the open Fediverse to join another corporate platform.
More likely twitter users.
And yes it’s corporate which is less good than mastodon.
But it is add-free, has a working algorithm, is feature rich, is open-source, lets you self-host etc. Full defederation is coming soon too.
Having used both bluesky (self hosted) and mastodon. The experience is simply far better on bluesky.
Unlike lemmy vs reddit. Where (except for active user count) there isn’t really a tradeoff. Lemmy is simply far better.
There was lot of people recommending BlueSky over Fediverse, when the big hype happened. The biggest problem to me is, that this split up the user base considerably. Which in turn weakened its potential for both platforms to overtake Twitter.
Just under us: If you want so, we took Twitter over. It’s renamed to X. :-p …, nah, just joking, it’s still Twitter.
I mean thanks to bridgy you can communicate across blusky and mastodon. For example people can follow my mastodon account on bluesky.
And bluesky has gained > 8 million users in the past couple months. Mastodon has 900 odd thousand MAU.
So clearly the majority have gone to one.
I don’t know where you got that number from, but at least these statistics say Mastodon got 9 million users (but not all are active off course, same should be true for BlueSky): https://mastodon-analytics.com/ And this account claims 15 million: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount and a Wikipedia article says “On 19 March 2023, Mastodon passed the ten million mark for registered user accounts”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)#2022_Twitter-related_spikes_in_adoption
Now, I do not claim these numbers to be correct. But compared to your estimation its vastly different.
Edit: Just for context of my reply, as you edited yours. You said you don’t believe Mastodon would even have 100 thousand users.
