So most of the new #mastodon growth was taken up by mastodon.social … right?
See
https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon … which doesn’t provide recent numbers by time, but does if you go into individual instances, such as mastodon.world, where you can see user growth mainly occurred on mastodon.social.
I imagine some users have also returned, bumping MAU but perhaps a little more distributed.
Along with lemmy.world, it looks like “centralisation” is relatively natural.
Centralization reduces friction. Normies who sign up on Mastodon are going to want to be able to talk to all of the other Twitter refugees too. By making mastodon.social the default, it encourages centralization of the mainstream portion of Mastodon’s userbase, such as journalists, official company accounts, public figures, etc.
But most of them are probably going to use BlueSky. I heard journalists have been mostly gravitating towards that option.