Growth Hacking is a thing. Whether that counts as real growth or not I don’t know. But metrics can become suspect when they become a target.
There are quite a number of people using Mastodon and it is quite nice but it does feel a bit echoey all the same. At the same time there is a lot of garbage on twitter that you really couldn’t call “active users” and keep a straight face. As usual e truth is usually somewhere in the middle ...