I think the fact it has survived for so long with an early usage of strictly Richard Stallman clones, now populated by even more insufferable turbolibs like Bluesky who fled the enXittification of the hellsite, means it is in fact very resilient to being killed by poor practices. How many of the users or hosts even contribute to projects? In the case of mastodon, you can't even blame people for forking to escape the misery of no reaction federation, no search, and other generally horrible water and plain bread vibes. People measuring the success of it by how many users or widely federated connections between those users there probably have a mindset engendered by arguing about video game patch notes and later social media censorship (i.e. psychopathy)