Until there is a viable Twitter competitor, this will continue and people will keep using it.
There needs to be one that scales. Mastodon had its chance and it's clear people don't want it. Maybe the answer is Bluesky, but that's not going to happen unless they open up their doors.
I can't believe I'm rooting for Meta, but their Threads app might work out and it will be better once it syncs with ActivityPub.
I don't think it's decentralization that really makes it complicated, rather there's no algorithm to keep you hooked and push you ads. It's all human curated and so it's harder to "get into" it if that makes sense
that, and it's also growing at the expected rate. mastodon is doing well, we just had an era of stability in social media for so long that a lot of people are forgetting how these platforms got started (or simply haven't grown up with that). no platform is going to replace something highly established like twitter in a days or even months, but at the current rate mastodon definitely looks like the next big thing.
the network effect is going strong, and that's really what matters. mastodon is alive and well, it's just at the beginning of its bell curve, while twitter is already over its peak.