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’m with you on the Twitter style format. Reddit / Lemmy is nice because you can have actual conversations. Twitter you are basically shouting into the void and sometimes it shouts back.
That format was pretty good for “Come see us live at the Sodbury Theatre in Glurpfortshire, Feb 32nd @9PM!”
I remember an instance where a Cracked.com article pointed out something like “5 creepy places on the internet” one of which was a dicussion forum in which one account was posting over and over, many times a day, about public appearances and such of the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and readers showed up en masse to harass this person. Turns out she was off-label using a forum engine as her own little microtwitter to publish alerts to a fan club. But when the Cracked author rejected that context and substituted his own, it smelled a lot like Humanbeing151.
But yes in general I find discussion boards to be more useful; I think it’s why they were invented first; Reddit and Lemmy are basically just different approaches to implementing Usenet.