I do hate to say this, but I can honestly say it appears that Mastodon had its chance and blew it. Daily users numbers are declining rapidly and even my small friends list is getting smaller day by day and less is happening on the platform all the time. Meanwhile threads is still growing and has a daily user base over a 100,000 times bigger….
So what went wrong? Well firstly threads came along and kinda did it better. Having a leg up from Instagram didn’t hurt it at all either. Threads with an estimated 100 million daily users versus just under a million daily users for mastodon says it all really. Next up – mastodon is way too techy for most – giving people the freedom to choose an instance puts them off rather than helping them make an informed choice. Again, threads here with a single “instance” is much easier. Lastly, for me, Mastodon is pitted against other federated services and platforms. Firefish/Sharkey/Pixelfed/Peertube for starters all federate easily and you can see them from Mastodon. This just diverts users rather than the idea of meaning different people can join in. As before too much choice often hurts something rather than helping it.
All in all I can pretty much say that Mastodon had its chance and squandered it, not by doing anything wrong per se but being something not focused enough and giving too much choice, by design. There will always be a place for activitypub, but at this rate it will be via WordPress and Threads not Mastodon.
A few reasons made me just about give up on it; the failure to include quote reposts being the big one for me, plus the alt-text fascists and in general there are too many earnest people on there.
I like some of the techy people – but yes it appears to have had its day as an alternative. BlueSky is less interesting though!