It's been eight years to the day since Lance Ulanoff, the storied Tech and Social Media Expert and an award-winning tech journalist, decided that Mastodon won't survive because William Shatner couldn't find him on here.
Eight years on, Mastodon stubbornly survives:
https://rys.io/en/177.html
Please join me in celebrating the annual Mastodon Won't Survive Day, right here on fedi. 
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As it happens, one of the oldest Mastodon instances – octodon dot social – is going to close down very soon.
This is a sad milestone, but it also shows the resilience of the broader network – people migrated, and relations remain.
That tiny volunteer-run instance survived longer than Google+ – a gigantic behemoth of a social network, backed by one of the largest tech companies in the world, and pushed down on everyone and their dog through mandatory integration with YouTube.
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@rysiek when Google+ fizzled out, @dredmorbius, me and a bunch of others set out to figure out where to move. There was a wiki, and the spreadsheet can still be accessed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14KPoeMOVo4Sr4y43kj01tdm4xi2wsuIh_HZxsfi92vA/edit?usp=sharing
Turns out that most of the central-instance-options are gone or totally enshittified, whereas as the fediverse options are still there and thriving and actually got at least a bit better on the parts that were marked as lacking in the spreadsheet.
@jollyorc @rysiek @dredmorbius
Damn, that's super cool to see (Diaspora* 😢 ). I'd love to see a "still active in 2025" column tacked on the end ;)
That Serendipity column is interesting. What were your metrics? Mastodon is market as yes, but in my experience, other than boosting, the serendipity is fairly low (the "who to follow" thing is next to useless, the explore feed is just popular accounts).
@jollyorc @rysiek @dredmorbius
True, true. I guess that's just a kind of diffuse, distributed recommender engine.
Somehow mastodon feels like it doesn't have subcultures in the way that twitter does. I wonder if part of Twitter's algorithm encouraged that?
Then again, I guess bubbles are the pathological form of subcultures..
Mastodon very much does have subcultures but in a different way than Twitter, and yes the absence of a single algorithmic feed has a lot to do with it. Here, Instances pay a bigger role here (especially with local-only posts) although it primarily relies on loose groupings of people many of whom follow each other.
@jdp23 @jollyorc @rysiek @dredmorbius
I would say that mastodon DOES have a single algorithmic feed - the explore feed. Of course it's calculated per instance, instead of Twitter's per user feed (and the algorithm is far simpler and more transparent than Twitter's), but that's part of what makes things feel more homogenous..
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
JollyOrc
naught101
Jon