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.
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.
You can put in their handle, with the domain they’ve signed up with
If you’re looking for more wider fuzzy search for that; mastodon 4.4 is gonna implement independent search services, meaning that search will be expanded beyond one server, and you can find new accounts on other servers just by keywords
this right here
I guess it’s for people like me, who have no friends?
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.
You would be able to find them if every instance didn’t decide to defederate with Threads.