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.
But the issue is that the temporary surges are not even followed by stability, they’re followed by decline. That’s not a recipe for sustainability.
Alternative analysis: it doesn’t help it to pretend there’s not a problem.
You mean after a surge there’s less active users than before?
The graphs suggest that there is a dependence on surges to counteract slow decline.