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.
When my own feed, free of the algorithm, did not have content of interest. Because I or others took turns shouting into the void. Then I would go on the explore /front page where there was definitely an algorithm of influencers, many who had follower counts of thousands, talking about the same stuff. Many seemed to be upper middle class Americans .
I soon hated them, but many were broadcast to other instances’ front page too. Between them and lack of interaction from people I wanted to hear from, I left