Thats likely due to lack of algorithms with goal to keep you browsing forever. Twitter likely harvests all the data it can get from you when you browse twitter. They can also track your browsing habits using your IP (among many other things) and sites that have embed twitter content like share button or embed tweets.

Finding people to follow in Mastodon mostly happens by:

• Search topics using hashtags
• Randomly browsing local feeds of different instances
• Randomly browsing the federated feed
• Randomly browsing local feed

There are instances for different interests like game development, art, information security, foss etc so there’s a lot of places to dig for good content.

Yeah, I’ve never even heard of anyone using imessages here in Finland. It’s mostly Discord or Whatsapp like you said and then maybe Teams for work and Signal with those few more tech savy friends.

Personally I think its ok for instances to delete older posts to save space provided that there are means to archive threads that users find valuable. For fediverse to thrive it should be as easy as possible for people to setup and manage instances without having to think about the storage space too much.

Archival of historical content is something that I feel should be handled separately.

I think there’s good chance for Lemmy and mastodon to become mainstream but I don’t they can replace their centralized counterparts. Mainly because I think that the social media in its current form is changing.

While platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and Tiktok are likely not going anywhere for a while, each time these platforms break the trust of their users the more cracks start to form to the service that leak out users. Some of these users will look for something new, some of these users will look for alternate services, some of these users will create their own services.

Many of these platforms rely on the attention economy, so all it really takes to make these platforms struggle is to divide that attention more and more to competitive platforms and services. This fragmentation has been happening for years now with people dividing their attention between multiple services like reddit, twitter, discord, facebook, tiktok, snapchat and whatnot. Now creating similar service for smaller audience is easier than ever and with A.I tools it’ll probably get even more easier.

Its a bit similar to video games and live services, with competition for players attention getting more fierce by the day.