@strypey
Just as likely, people set up Mastodon accounts in a fit of pique, and never really use them.
Implying there is nothing that is trying to engage with them.
Personally, I think the main problem is a poorly understood and mostly unexpressed issue with the way fedi treats domains. Most people will simply think your stuff is broken if the "Mastodon" randomly forgets who they are; when people click on links, they end up on foreign servers (emblazoning "Mastodon" logos) and they forget to check that the domain in the address bar has changed. This even happens when people sign up with apps.
ActivityPub wants to be a new decen Internet-wide protocol that people use directly. But it doesn't want to tick all the technical boxes that make such protocols user-friendly. "Good enough for techies who will hop over the gaps" is evidence that the designers lacked engineering savvy.
But active account numbers in the fediverse, and more importantly overall server numbers, continue to be much higher than pre-2024.
Conversely, a case could be made that there are significant losses being masked by diehard users opening multiple accounts for alternate modes like Lemmy, Pixelfed and Peertube. (IIRC, someone was writing about this being a trend among fedi users.)
