Why does this chart just go down? 0 once again marks the spot.

I wasn’t going to blog about the Return To X fad. At least it’s voluntary, unlike the Return To Office fad. What finally inspired me was a blog post by Matt Birchler, Why does this chart just go down? The blog post spotlights this issue: What makes Mastodon a place most people come to and go, "no thanks"? Answering this question is key if you, like me, want Mastodon to thrive. The blog post also presents a chart of Mastodon monthly active users over the past four years. Although I won’t dispute Birchler’s general point, I think the chart is misleading, because the origin is placed just before Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022 rather than before the release of Mastodon in 2016. Birchler neglects to mention how Mastodon went from 0 to 470k monthly active users without the “help” of Musk. In any case, the chart ends with the recent count of 732k monthly Mastodon users, significant growth relative to both 2016 and 2022. Nonetheless, Birchler’s point is that after the acquisition…