It has already succeeded at being a decent social network for people for whom Twitter was too toxic.
I don't see Mastodon being less toxic, the whole mastodon.lol (~70k users) drama over a video game was a perfect example of that.
On the other hand it also showed to me that single user self-hosting is the only way to go with Mastodon.
My point was more that there's no real profit motive to Mastodon, so it can't fail in that sense, which is generally what we're talking about when we're talking about web services.
If 75% of the new people on Mastodon eventually go to BlueSky, the people who remain will probably be perfectly happy to remain on Mastodon, and I don't know how one can call that a failure.
Moderation is also way better on Mastodon, so even with those features, the impact should be lessened.
Ivory is a fantastic UI for Mastodon. Mastodon's only big hiccup really is the confusion around picking an instance. But that will go away once a few "normie" instances get a foothold and serve as a kind of "America Online" for the Fediverse.
Secondarily the fact that it doesn't tune for engagement means casual users will tend to bounce off of it (since there is nothing to sink them in and keep them coming back). But to many that's a feature rather than a bug. Akin to losing smokers by banning smoking in bars.
I don't use Mastodon (nor Twitter, nor Bluesky, etc.), but if that sort of thing did appeal to me, Mastodon would be the only one that would be acceptable precisely because it doesn't tune for engagement.
"Tuning for engagement" and/or using the usual "stickiness" tricks is a huge red flag to me.
for Mastodon being key here because they still haven't made it able to correctly talk to non-Mastodon instances (I'm convinced[1] this is because they've used `int64` for their status IDs despite the spec saying don't.)
[1] My Akkoma instance shows no posts - status IDs are opaque, non-`atoi`-able strings. My GotoSocial instance shows many posts but they are all the same post - status IDs all currently being with `01` which would explain the presence of posts and all being the same. In summary, stupid.
That's not the reason, the reason it will fail is that although federation is a strength in some ways the other way is you're putting your faith in maybe just 1 person moderating and maintaining the instance you choose. If you build your audience at one address that place might disappear overnight if that persons life circumstances change and then (correct me if I'm wrong) you need that persons permission to move to another server.
Tech doesn't get funding because it's good, it gets good because it's funded. Blusky will be the Windows to Mastodon's linux.