Tim Chambers has his yearly predictions post for the open web. I enjoy these posts and I agree with most of his predictions for 2026.

But there is one prediction that I think is too optimistic:

The ActivityPub Fediverse (excluding Threads) will cross 15 million registered users, monthly active users […] will plateau around 2-3 million. Another good year in terms of stable base, but no big waves of new users. Both Bluesky and Fediverse growth won’t come from big waves of migration this year.

To put this in context, according to FediDB the current count of registered users is just short of 12 million. It has grown about 1 million users in each of the last couple of years. I know from Micro.blog’s contribution to these numbers that there are also spam accounts and other junk that has yet to be cleaned out, but still I think these numbers are mostly correct.

You can see this steady, slow growth in total users from this FediDB graph:

The problem is active users. There, we see occasional spikes as users migrate from Twitter / X, but generally the fediverse in terms of active users is shrinking, not growing. Absent some major event or new fediverse platform, I don’t expect active users to get much over 1 million again, let alone 2-3 million. Here’s the graph of the last couple of years:

January through April 2025 was the influx of users from Twitter / X, as Trump took office and Elon Musk went all-in on politics and culture wars. But a few months later that fediverse growth had evaporated, and active users today is apparently less than it was two years ago.

One way to view this is that the fediverse rises and falls naturally based on current events and popular software. Another way to view it is that the fediverse is in trouble, boxed in on one side by massive Bluesky growth and on the other side held back by the dominance of Mastodon.

Mastodon is an incredible success story, yet it still feels unapproachable for new users and it has changed very little in the last several years. I think Mastodon recreates some problems from Twitter in likes and boosts, fixes a few things such as an open protocol and more hands-on curation with small communities, while also adding new wrinkles in the form of local timelines leading to filter bubbles and pile-ons.

There is nothing wrong with Mastodon remaining a small platform in the context of Threads and Bluesky. If people are finding value in it, contributing to the open web, that’s great. But if I’m right that the fediverse has already plateaued, and we care about expanding indie blogging and open social networks, we must continue to adopt a plurality approach, not tied only to the ActivityPub-based fediverse. More platforms should have strong support for RSS and multiple social protocols, rooted in blogs and the broader open web.

Manu Moreale reflecting on a Mastodon post that attempted to simplify the world into effectively good and bad people:

I keep thinking about this tweet because to me it embodies one of the core issues I have with general social media discourse: the lack of depth.

This fits with a theme I’ve been blogging about throughout the year. In a stressful, divisive world, we are quick to label other people. We dig our heels in without nuance, vilifying our perceived enemies. As I blogged earlier this year:

I’m drawn to blogging about divisive topics, but it would probably be healthier to avoid it. People can be so tribal now that everything is either good or bad. Our views have become extreme caricatures of the truth.

And after my post recently about Mastodon, someone reminded me of when Wil Wheaton was run off Mastodon. Wil Wheaton, really? Moments like that make it easy to see why newcomers to the fediverse often feel like unwelcome outsiders.

I want to err on the side of defending good people even when they are caught up in overblown drama online. Yet I often do so in roundabout ways, from a distance, because engaging directly is a losing battle that makes everyone feel worse.