Yeah, I do get the EEE angle people are worried about but that should really be halted from the Extend phase onwards if and when it comes up, otherwise people are just going to use the popular one - which will be Threads. It will start with an established userbase. It will start with the marketing Meta can throw at it.
Nobody outside of the HN crowd gives half a fluff about distributed social. They'll use the one that lets them interact with people they know. If that means they can talk cross-instance, sweet, they will. If they can't, Mastodon and ActivityPub in general continues to be a pain that the majority wont bother with.
If that's Mastodon's goal, fair enough. I think it's a bad goal.
Care to elaborate? I haven't had the pleasure of checking Mastodon out. (You're talking about that, right?) And also, which instance are you talking about?
FWIW, I've been using the Fediverse as my primary social media for ~a year, and I've not experienced these technical/social issues being described.
Yes instances occasionally have issues... But I've experienced less outages than on twitter.
Yes there are unsavory types on some servers, but in my experience most are pretty good at defed-ing from them if needed, and you can block/mute individuals.
Picking an instance is a major hurdle. There's no usable feed from the get-go. Following people, especially from other instances, is not intuitive. There's no functional search, no quotes.
Mods are volunteers and can wipe you out at a whim, or just decide to quit the instance. They'll also regularly defederate with other instances, which means they break your followers and whom you follow. There's a perpetual worry of losing everything. In any case, media attached to your content is regularly wiped out, to save costs.
You'll have a feed and see like/boost/whichever icons showing zero. Then you open the individual post and it has non-zero values. Which still is wrong. The original post might have 100 likes but your version shows 15. Not only will it lag, it may never sync as this entirely depends on users on your instance following particular users on other instances.
Worse, the same is true for replies. You will not see most other users replies as those replies are only federated if that user is followed by anyone from your instance. Hence you'll get an original thread with tons of similar replies because users are not seeing the other replies.
I could go on, but almost nothing about it works correctly in the way conventional social media does. It is sorely lacking in basic features and features that are there work poorly.
Second, the cultural part...
Mastodon is basically a community of leftist tech folks, lgbtq, and general misfits. Nothing wrong with that, everybody deserves their place. The problem is that they developed a culture of anti-everything and extreme safetysm.
The bar for hate speech is so low as to exclude most people. They're against any type of commercialization, institutes, influencers. They're against any type of growth or improvement and consider the broken parts of Mastodon features, not shortcomings.
I don't mean to escalate this into a culture war discussion, I'm saying that this attitude is what sabotages Mastodon as a whole from improving and growing, and possibly becoming a much larger and more serious alternative network.
The culture is so cynical and counter productive that even those in the ideological bubble can't take it anymore, this constant in-fighting.
None of this means the entire Mastodon experience is useless. I have used it and it somewhat works. But the more you understand about how it works, the more you realize it can't possibly be a replacement for conventional networks.
It's worth noting that the only time I've payed any attention to twitter is in the last several months, so it's weighted to be worse than it was prior to recent happenings.
The server where I have an account has had downtime twice in the past 200 something days, and had search go down once in that time frame. Occasionally I'll see an update from another server saying "<search|image hosting|replies> are temporarily down", but life goes on fine and they rejoin when they can.
Nobody outside of the HN crowd gives half a fluff about distributed social. They'll use the one that lets them interact with people they know. If that means they can talk cross-instance, sweet, they will. If they can't, Mastodon and ActivityPub in general continues to be a pain that the majority wont bother with.
If that's Mastodon's goal, fair enough. I think it's a bad goal.