Was talking with a friend about the future of social media, why it sucks, what can be done about it. He advocated a dencentralized approach (actual decentralization not web3 dencentralization) and we talked about Matrix for a while, compared it with cohost and mastodon.
I think the thing that made mastodon suck so bad is it's kind of the worst of all worlds. You can't have such a large character limit and still display things as tweet timelines! You're just posting but the posts are small and the formatting sucks! Also it tended to attract people who just, to put it simply, love marking their territory in an agressive manner, and use all the quality of life aspects of masto (spoilering and etc) into ways they could enforce those boundaries in as punishing a manner as possible.
That being said, I don't know if cohost has what it takes to break out and reach critical mass, or if it even needs to. The internet is a smaller place now because our idea of the internet is a smaller place. The waveform has collapsed. If something new can be created the most important part of that is going to be opening ourselves up, individually and collectively, to such things being possible. And after the past few years that's a pretty big ask!
as an addendum for this i think the main thing that makes twitter the hotel california of websites is that it is basically a big casino. the melding of the basic hooks of gambling addiction and the intrinsic human need for socialization (often coming close to that ever craved sensation of Connection but falling tantilizingly short of that 99 percent of the time) makes it a compulsion hard to wrest oneself from especially if you are like the majority of humans in modernity: tired, starved, anxious and afraid. It's the variable reinforcement schedual of parasociality!