Dave Troy 
Another design consideration re: Mastodon is that it works well for ephemeral asynchronous communications, but for many reasons should not be counted on as an archival resource. Media attachments are periodically purged and may not be available after a week, or a month, etc. While some servers may try to preserve content forever, this may be costly and unsustainable. Creators, researchers should treat this as an ephemeral resource and make provisions for self-archiving anything important.
Ashton Pittman@davetroy If accurate, this may be the biggest reason why Mastodon won't be able to become a Twitter replacement. The way Twitter serves as a cultural archive is indispensable. Although Elon Musk is working hard to trash it.
@ashton imho anyone this expecting to be a “Twitter replacement” is kinda asking the wrong questions. Better to think of this as something different that has other properties, with pluses and minuses. Behaviors like archiving can potentially be filled by a third party provider, and profitably.
Jeff Jachens