In the long term, alternative platforms need to be built on something different than outrage and “not being the bad company”. In the end, the vast majority of people cares very little about the underlying technology, they just want their content and people to interact with. Mastodon is in decline already, the fediverse shouldn’t be a place where people come to say “wow, [company] sure does suck”, and then go back to that company if they actually need a piece of information or reach a person that does not know or care what an API or federated protocol is, aka 99% of the population.
I would be really curious where this data is coming from. https://mastodon-analytics.com shows a very different userbase, which might be due to different definitions of “active”, but what seems really fishy is the 72% increase. What timespan are we looking at here? 72% since 2021?