First, Mastodon isn’t the only option - it’s not like both couldn’t fail just as both AIM and MySpace did.
Second, Mastodon runs on open protocols. That has good and bad points - for example, it won’t grow as quickly as a project with huge corporate backing - but it does mean that there’s a more direct link between the community and its longevity. Twitter isn’t just flailing because Musk is doing management by bong rip but also because he’s desperately trying to get out of a financial hole. Open source projects have different kinds of financial challenges but they’re never on the hook trying to fill a hole measured in billions of dollars, either. Given the number of communities older than Twitter I’d say it’s far from proven that Twitter will outlast anything.
I found it really interesting that one of the main Iceland instances is being run on a Raspberry Pi out of some student's living room in Sweden. Over 500 users at the moment.
https://types.pl/@tritlo/109383888427885539
why? a single app running on a single server is several orders of magnitude more resilient than a spaghetti clusterfuck of services upon services. twitter could be brought down by a single expired certificate
- completely dead with ssl invalid certificates with expired domains.
So you would have to keep moving to another mastodon instance (if you're lucky) or try and run your own instance and join the many instances with the three issues above.
There is no monetary incentive to keep a mastodon instance running and we both know that begging for donations doesn't scale.
There's a gigantic flood of new users (i.e. literally multiplying the userbase) in the past few weeks, so yeah, a lot of servers are restricting signups to cope.
I don't think "begging for donations" needs to scale, if instances get too large to keep running then smaller instances should (and do) split off, they can still talk to each other after all.
This seems to be more true of Mastodon than Twitter.
I can't imagine any self hosted Mastodon instance staying up longer than twitter.