FB and similar drive numbers by using shady tactics is what I call it. They have influenced instagram to do similar things as well right? Not giving users what they want, instead spreading it out and making them scroll extra before getting the posts from from friends or other likes. Abusing notifications to get additional usage and other tactics.
I do not consider lack of competing with fbooks numbers as not successful. Unless you are strictly speaking about wall street monetization desires, success of mastodon or other systems to me is whether or not they provide a service that is valuable to those who use it.
Firechat, signal and others may never match the numbers posted by fbook, yet those people who have been able to communicate and share in places without worrying about their messages being stopped by different groups of censors, or worse - these tools are immensely successful, even if they have only helped hundreds or thousands of people and not billions served.
Just because many people are addicted to fbook with thier centralized how to keep them hooked / addiction specialists does not mean it is providing a better product.
Specialization of labor and network effects can be backed into other open source things. The growth of one click installs at places like Digital Ocean is the beginning of this trend imho.
If fbook was the perfect vessel for sharing then phub, whatevertorrent, vpns, and similar would not exist much less be popular.
Has anyone started a MAU chart showing how many users communiques have been shared with govts around the world? Anyone have a tally on the number of arrests in the phillipines (and others) and kills in malaysia (and others) that have been enabled by fbook?
I've people promote fbook as free and state as "fact" that users won't pay for self hosted or moderated solutions.
Fbook is not free, it has many costs.
As some of these alternatives mature, I believe we will see more and more people using them more often. Some paying with cash, some paying with drive space / cycles donated, some paying by giving thanks to friends of family who are allowing them to use slices of their systems.
Mastodon is not better for Kim K, and likely will never be, what is better or not is relative to many factors and that is going to be different for different people / groups.