As someone who uses Mastodon semi-regularly, I can tell you that the majority of active users are not on the large instances. Most active users are on extremely

As someone who uses Mastodon semi-regularly, I can tell you that the majority of active users are not on the large instances. Most active users are on extremely small instances moderated by single individuals, and most instances are actually extremely short lived. It's common to get DMs from accounts saying that they've migrated from foo.social to bar.social every once in a while. Most people also have alts on multiple instances. My theory is that the largest instances are only large because they are the instances that have been around for the longest, and therefore have had time to accumulate a large amount of inactive accounts.