Personally, I don't really give a shit about how many users there are on the various Fediverse platforms I use.

As Mastodon is the one that gets 90% of my use, I'll talk about that in particular.

I've been a regular Mastodon user since the great influx of late 2022. In those 3.5 years I've somehow managed to convince more people to follow me than I ever did in 15 years of using Twitter. I follow almost 700 people, so my feed always has something new to show me. Always. I don't follow any journalists, I don't follow any 'celebrities', save for one or two comedians. At no point have I ever thought that Mastodon needs more users, because - for me at least - it's plenty busy enough, and does what I need it to do. It lets me interact with regular people talking about their regular lives and regular interests, and that's wonderful to me.

I'm at a point where I don't really care to understand why a platform must be the number one most popular, if what it already is is sufficient.

That said, it would be useful if more official resources had a presence on there. Local councils, government departments, etc... And companies who appear to have offloaded most of their customer service to social media, but stopped at X and Facebook.

The one thing I've never really understood is why that sort of thing has yet to take off. News outlets, for example, could spin up a server on their own official domain, and provide accounts to employees. So someone posting from a @news.bbc.com instance could, at a glance, be understood to be a genuine BBC reporter.

However, personally I avoid news like the plague these days, so for me that's neither here nor there.