Myself and many of my followers and the people that I follow are suddenly starting to adopt Mastodon, especially with clients that cross-post to both Twitter and Mastodon - because we just don’t like the official Twitter client and are unhappy with Twitter’s recent killing-off of third-party clients.

I remember when the www was the same and the CompuServe users said the same thing.

Mastodon has a similar feel in that the content is amateurish and free.

As an anecdote, I use chaos.social and they are throttling signups because there are too many new signups. Maybe you will be surprised.

Yeah, but I remember when the same thing was said about Diaspora. I remember when the same thing was said about various indie game consoles. I remember when the same thing was said about a whole bunch of social network alternatives that never went anywhere.

I get the feeling that regardless of how much more growth Mastodon gets, it's going to be around and in active use for a long time to come, if only because it's provided a space that is meaningfully different to Twitter.

Will it be the biggest social phenomenon? Probably not. But it already has the critical mass to keep funding its continued development, and lot of interesting voices, if you know where to look.

But you can hope right? Or are you happy with your communication, content, attention and ideas controlled for profit?