Do you think has blown its big chance?
If Mastodon is a fit to the job, it would have exploded with popularity.
There are longstanding challenges to marketing something like Mastodon. Call it the "fediverse" or "PubSubHubBub" and I think people's eyes glaze over. But it doesn't have to appeal to everybody, and it might be better if it doesn't... Wouldn't it be great if we could undo the "Eternal September?"
On Mastodon I am more active than I've ever been on Twitter. This is of course also a side effect of it being new and exciting for many people. But what exactly do I get from Mastdodon becoming gigantic? All I need is a healthy, active userbase.
I don't care if Mastodon ever "overtakes" Twitter, all I care about is whether Mastodon can cultivate enough active users to stay healthy.
and now there is enough churn/pain on Twitter to overcome the activation energy hump of moving to a new platform.
We need a social network to share short texts which cannot be easily turned off at the whim of a billionaire [or a government for that matter ] - Mastodon could be that thing, could grow into that thing, so is worth trying.
It also doesnt have to be perfect or complete to succeed - we can fix things and scale as we use it.
Our individual choices are a vote for the future we want - getting there is a noisy stochastic process.
I think it's far too many months early to tell.
It's a good thing it's not push-button easy, or the tsunami might have drowned it. Most of them would leave anyway ... not enough sugar rush.