Manton Reece @manton has some thoughts on Mastodon: Mastodon CEO change, 2026 reset

I’ve noted a drastic decline in activity in my Mastodon timeline. The people I follow just aren’t posting as much as they formerly did. I’ll sit and scroll the Mastodon timeline for a few minutes and discover to my surprise that I’ve scrolled back through 12 hours.

Of the three Twitterlike services, Bluesky and Threads are far more active for me.

On the other hand, I get far more activity on my posts on Mastodon than I do on Bluesky and Threads — more replies, likes and reblogs. I think it’s because at least two very popular Masto users follow me and occasionally boost my posts, which has helped me attract more followers there. I have 1,100 Mastodon followers, compared with 677 on Bluesky and 285 on Threads.

However, I get most of the activity on my posts on Facebook, with Tumblr a solid second place. Masto is third, Bluesky and Threads a distant fourth and fifth and mitchwagner.com gets hardly any activity at all, and I do it because I just like blogging.

I really want Mastodon to succeed. I like the philosophy, and I like that the platform permits posts of any length (if you choose an instance configured that way). I can’t stand being locked into a 300- or 500-character box.

I hope new management breathes new life into Mastodon. As Cory Doctorow points out, the reason that Bluesky and Threads take off isn’t because proprietary platforms are inherently superior to open source — it’s because those two platforms have much more money than Mastodon does.

It frustrates me that Mastodon and Bluesky insist on being separate silos. They need to get it together and become one thing. Arguing over AT protocol vs. ActivityPub is foolish.