Any time there is something new everyone will sign up to try it out. Give it time. Once there are enough intrusive ads, or subtle ads shimmed into answers, social manipulation and political bias once it hits critical mass, rewriting of history, squeezed rate limits, more cost for less rate limits that number will drop if they are honest and/or deleting inactive accounts. The negative features will not creep in until they believe they have achieved critical corporate capture and dependency.
Twitter has a TON of active users though and those aren't going anywhere.
Hell, those that did leave Twitter did it to move to Bluesky which is basically Twitter under a different banner.
Even if people move away from specific instances of some form of technology (like Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon or whatever) they are not necessarily moving away from the idea/tech iself (like microblogging in this example).
Same with other social media: notice how after "Reddit gone shit" the people who felt like that and did move away didn't move back to forums or whatever, they went to Reddit-like boards like Lemmy.
Active users on twitter has gone down massively the past 4 years! As far as we know, because the company doesn’t report numbers as proactively as it used to.
And sure, you can say people just moved to other platforms, but I don’t think you can substantiate that either.
Personally I just dropped all twitter likes, and a lot of my old twitter friends did too. We have discord servers now.
But it’s hard to have a discussion like this without data and we’re never gonna have the data. So you have to use qualitative data instead.
