Mastodon can only “fail” at being what it’s not trying to be: a Twitter replacement.
It has already succeeded at being a decent social network for people for whom Twitter was too toxic.
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.