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.
Mastodon is not struggling.
Looking at two surges of new users seeing the vast majority not stick around and missing that a sizable chunk still stayed is missing the point.
This article would never have been written if the user increase didn’t have temporary surges, that result would be the same number of users, but less brand recognition.
Mastodon is also not driven by the same kind of metrics as a centralized system, plenty of people can just run their own instance just for the fun of it, they don’t need constant growth.
So calm down, and take it slow.
Don’t sell Mastodon short.
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.
On the very end of the graph you can see it sort of beginning to stabalize, there was even a small uptick in the second to last point, and sure, the last point shows a small decrease again.
My point is that it is too early to call out for danger regarding mastodon, that is too alarmist and may scare new users from the platform, speeding up the end of Mastodon.
So untill we have a period of time without surges it is hard to determine user growth