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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[–] Fedditor385@lemmy.world 65 points 1 month ago (12 children)

It's not dead but it has one big and massive issue that prevents mass adoption - discovery. If I can't just write the name of my friends in search and find them no matter where they made their account - for an ordinary user, or one that comes from centralized services, this seems extremely alien and hostile.

And in the end, if you can't find your friends, you want to interact with, what is the point of using the service?

Luckily, Mastodon is working on a discorvery protocol that should offer a way to find people across the board, which will hopefully make the Fediverse "appear" centralized to the average Joe while maintaining all the benefits of decentralization to the advanced users.

[–] blue_berry@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Problem: even with discovery, if your friends are on Threads or X, you still won't find them on Mastodon. But its a step in the right direction.

[–] Fedditor385@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Unless you can follow specific people on blocked instances, this is a fail. If my friend is on another instance which is blocked from my instance... whats the point of the fediverse? Might aswell go back to Facebook or X/Twitter. They are shitty but at least I can see my friends.

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