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.

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[–] dragontamer 114 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (23 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Microblogging is definitely useful for many things, short and quick thoughts, links to news articles, jokes, memes etc. You can also comment and share things easily. Microblogging actually resembles instant messaging in a lot of ways, just with an undefined ’group chat’ size.

I find it kinda funny that Twitter has become so toxic that people start thinking there must be something wrong with the format.

Also RSS clearly can’t replicate a big chunk of the desirable properties of microblogging (eg. easy sharing and commenting).

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