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.
I’ve been engaging with Lemmy more than Mastodon. Lemmy allows for more interactions through discussions. To me, it seems like Mastodon is slower to get interactions (for context, I have accounts on three different instances and used to post dark/gothic/satirical/surrealist poetry written by me daily, but I haven’t posted in days because no one seems to be really engaging with it). Mastodon has a lot of potential, but I think few are really committed to stick to the fediverse and all its potential.
As for why people don’t come back, maybe they’re confused about which instance to use since there are thousands of different instances for different purposes, I’m not exactly sure.
I never really got into Twitter format. Been more of a fan of long form discussion that can bring more insight. Mastodon and bluesky just fill that void, although has replaced twitter for me.