Disagree about Mastodon -- I think it or the protocols backing it, will be the glue that holds the rest of social media together. You may not be using something branded "Mastodon" in 2035, but it will probably be Mastodon underneath.
I'm not sure that's true. The site runs best when most employees are out of the office during the last week or two of December and when employees are busy writing peer reviews on the last day or two before that portion of the review cycle ends.
Craigslist without maintenance probably turns into just scams and spam.
For example, we have a process based on the idea of the downtime budget from the SRE book. If the downtime allowed by the SLA of our customers is spent halfway, all changes to the systems have to be approved by leadership. Cosmetic bugs can be tolerated for two weeks in order to not risk anything.
On the other hand, if the necessary maintenance of the supporting infrastructure of a system is stopped, the system is running towards a cliff. It certainly depends on how deep the stack goes and how many redundancies and self-healing ideas are built into a system. If you have redundant storage arrays with redundant drives, with redundant systems built on top of these, with smart failover strategies, the overall infrastructure can tolerate a terrifying amount of damage while still running reliably.
But once that redundancy degrades and rots away, and once that resulting final linchpin drive or system instance fails, it'll result in an unsalvageable clusterfuck very, very quickly. Especially if you fire important core SRE and ops staff.
When was Twitter profitable ?!
Probably for the better. I read more long form articles and don't get caught up in the outrage of the day. I feel happier too. Sometimes I miss it, go to the site to read, and then immediately close the tab when I can't actually use it because it's so bad.
Twitter had already become less enjoyable than it was back in the day, that started before Musk and isn't his fault. The underlying engagement was no longer there, only inertia. Inertia alone would have kept me there much longer, but without true engagement I wasn't going to start using their crappy official client/site, and the idea of paying for a subscription was laughable.
Twitter won't die like MySpace did, losing to a single party like Mastodon as MySpace did to Facebook. It will die like Craigslist. It will be very slow, still be around a decade from now, having lost its cultural relevance and having been supplanted by a number of different options rather than one. I'm seeing Twitter's niche get fragmented to different places, and everyone has one foot out the door and the engagement is dwindling slowly but intractably. The brand is poison, but people are taking their time to figure out how to deal with that. So I'm not expecting to see an abrupt exodus. Nor do I expect to see Mastodon become as big as Twitter was, or die out completely.