Is Mastodon dead?
TL;DR
No.
Rationale
I’ve stopped believing early on that social media is a zero-sum game, and that we should use whatever works for us and with the people we care about. Mastodon is only one of the many services that federate in the Fediverse (federated social media) and there a whole lot more services and apps that are in that Fediverse. Even Threads will be joining the Fediverse (hopefully) soon.
Is the engagement lower than earlier this year? Yes, perhaps. But it’s difficult to tell if people are using it less, or it’s due to me using a shared block list and perhaps ended up blocking legitimate instances, which is definitely something I would need to fix asap.
Should you join the Fediverse? Absolutely, and if you have the capacity to self-host your own Mastodon instance then by all means do. Not only you will learn a lot but you will also own your data, and no one can reuse/misuse your social media data for their own profit motive.
