I don’t like the clickbait title at all – Mastodon’s clearly going to survive, at least for the forseeable future, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it outlives Xitter.
Still, Mastodon is struggling; most of the people who checkd it out in the November 2022 surge (or the smaller June 2023 surge) didn’t stick around, and numbers have been steadily declining for the last year. The author makes some good points, and some of the comments are excellent.
Computers handle data and files are simply data stored on the physical medium.
While I get your point, I don’t think that they are a good example in the least. If we had only one file type that was always structured the same, maybe, but that’s not the case. Files are essentially atomic.