I don’t like the clickbait title at all – Mastodon’s clearly going to survive, at least for the forseeable future, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it outlives Xitter.
Still, Mastodon is struggling; most of the people who checkd it out in the November 2022 surge (or the smaller June 2023 surge) didn’t stick around, and numbers have been steadily declining for the last year. The author makes some good points, and some of the comments are excellent.
Because Threads and BlueSky form effective competition with Twitter.
Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks. It’s become obvious. That Twitter was mostly algorithm hype and FOMO.
Mastodon tries to be healthier but I’m not convinced that microblogs in general are that useful, especially to a techie audience who knows RSS and other publishing formats.
They are in competition with Mastodon, and have a marketing budget.
Five years from now, those platforms will become enshittified as their budgets dry up. They will need to milk the users for revenue. Well see another surge in a few years, until they learn that Mastodon is actually better.
Then the next Billionaire with a massive ego and huge budget comes out and makes another one.
Or we get Jack Dorsey making a new company for a 3rd time.
Your post could fit on Mastodon
My post above is 376 characters, which would have required three tweets under the original 140 character limit.
Mastodon, for better or worse, has captured a bunch of people who are hooked on the original super-short posting style, which I feel is a form of Newspeak / 1984-style dumbing down of language and discussion that removed nuance. Yes, Mastodon has removed the limit and we have better abilities to discuss today, but that doesn’t change the years of training (erm… untraining?) we need to do to de-program people off of this toxic style.
Especially when Mastodon is trying to cater to people who are used to tweets.
EDIT: and second, Mastodon doesn’t have the toxic-FOMO effect that hooks people into Twitter (or Threads, or Bluesky).
People post not because short sentences are good. They post and doom-scroll because they don’t want to feel left out of something. Mastodon is healthier for you, but also less intoxicating / less pushy. Its somewhat doomed to failure, as the very point of these short posts / short-engagement stuff is basically crowd manipulation, FOMO and algorithmic manipulation.
Without that kind of manipulation, we won’t get the kinds of engagement on Mastodon (or Lemmy for that matter).