Are We Seeing the Slow Death of Mastodon?

A few days ago, I received an email from the administrator of my current Mastodon instance (moth.social) informing me that the instance is shutting down, and I have until March to migrate my account, or all my data will be deleted.

I’ve been slowly drifting away from Mastodon in favour of Bluesky, so this email caught me a little off guard. In fact, I had forgotten I even had an account on Mastodon, as I deleted the app from my phone and haven’t used it for months.

I felt compelled to write this because this story isn’t unique. It seems that more and more Mastodon instances are going offline. And it’s not just moth.social that’s shutting down; for example, botsin.space, a Mastodon instance dedicated to operating Mastodon bots, is also closing its doors.

When you look at the stats, they don’t paint an optimistic picture either. The latest figures from FediDB show that the number of users and monthly active users (MAU) is dropping at a significant rate.

If you want to keep track of the number of instances going online (or offline) each day, check out @fediverseobserver on Mastodon (or on Bluesky via bridgy).

This raises the question: why are so many instances shutting down?

As I mentioned earlier, there are many reasons for this. The botsin.space example I referenced is shutting down primarily because it’s expensive to run. As for moth.social, they haven’t provided a precise reason, but I suspect it’s for similar reasons—although I could be wrong.

The bottom line is that Mastodon is hard to manage. Whether you’re running an instance for yourself or for a larger community, managing it demands a lot of time and resources. Trust me, I’ve experienced this first-hand and have documented it in a separate post.

Am I sad that my instance is closing down? If I’m honest, not really. In fact, I guess it was inevitable. I’ve said on numerous occasions on this blog that operating your own instances on the Fediverse is a significant challenge.

When you factor in the cost of resources and the time required to moderate and maintain instances, it’s no wonder so many are shutting down. At the end of the day, most instances are run by volunteers with limited capital, resources, and funding. This leaves them with little choice but to shut up shop. I suspect this will become an increasingly common trend in 2025 as Bluesky continues to gain traction.

So, is Mastodon going to die? Probably not. I’m sure there will always be a subset of people who continue to use it, but I don’t see myself being one of them. I feel it will eventually become a space for the ultra-dedicated, but not for the mainstream public (not that it ever truly was).