In comparison to Twitter (Since Mastodon zealots often pitch it as a 'Twitter alternative' somehow) 7 years after it launched, it had well over 250M+ total users with well over 150M daily actives. [0] Even Nostr has 6M total users in less than 7 years. [1] Either way, total registered number of users tells us nothing about the usage of the network.
Yet we have daily actives much less than 1.5M with a large drop in users this year since they don't stick around on Mastodon. [2] It only tells us that there are very loud crickets screaming about migrating to Mastodon which accounted for less than 1% of Twitter's total number of users. (And most of them never stuck around)
7 years is not early days with this. Matrix launched in 2014 and reached 10M in less than 5 years and multiplied by up to 8x to 80M in less than 4 years [3] and it is highly competitive against Signal. There is no excuses for such sluggish user numbers for Mastodon with even less monthly active users.
Thus, I think we have given Mastodon enough time and it is clear that it hasn't taken off. Perhaps it is time to stop pretending about users caring about signing up to a over-engineered discord forum promoting pseudo-federation.
[0] https://backlinko.com/twitter-users
[1] https://stats.nostr.band/#total_users
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump...