I'll post this every time mastodon comes up: to compare mastodon to Twitter, Facebook, bsky, etc. is fallacious in the extreme. Saying that mastodon is "losing" to bluesky is a complete non-sequitur.

Mastodon hasn't lost to these other services because they aren't competing. Nobody on mastodon actually wants to replace Twitter. Mastodon exists explicitly as a rejection of mainstream social media. Calling this "losing" is like saying that a bunch of kids playing basketball in the street are "losing" to pro hockey teams. Not the same game, not the same scale, the only similarity is that they're both playing a sport.

Mastodon doesn't want to compete. That's totally counter to the entire philosophy. Mastodon isn't even remotely playing the same game as twitter and Facebook. It just so happens that mastodon has a text box with limited characters. That's it, that's the only similarity.

Of course a chess club of 10 year olds in Japan isn't going to "win" and displace the entire American baseball league. You'd be laughed down for even suggesting that. And yet, people think that mastodon is "losing".

Mastodon is exactly where it wants to be. The small scale and diffusion are features, not bugs.

Besides that, it's functionally impossible for "mastodon" to go mainstream. To suggest that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what mastodon is, how it works, and how the people involved run it. At absolute most, you could get a few big servers to go 'mainstream'.

When a server gets too big or too popular, the network treats it as damage and routes around. A lot of admins do this purely on principle: huge servers are antithetical to the philosophy and actively bad for the network. The rest block them because the vast majority of attacks and spam originate from such servers.

If mastodon went mainstream, the network would fracture (again) and the majority of nodes would re-form the network in the obscurity they enjoy and value.

This is all extremely intentional and deliberate. Mastodon is an explicit rejection of all the things you think it's "losing" at. Mastodon doesn't want to "win", they largely want to be left alone to continue enjoying a small internet with limited connections.

Mastodon has won its own game. It's firmly established itself in a niche, and is not going to move from that niche to chase fads, engagement, metrics, profit. Mastodon wants to be exactly what it is because mainstream social media is a very bad thing

You sold me on mastodon. Is there a node for scientists? How do I find it?