You've inadvertently highlighted part of the appeal of Mastodon here. People using Mastodon are the ones who see problems with platforms like Twitter. People wh

You've inadvertently highlighted part of the appeal of Mastodon here. People using Mastodon are the ones who see problems with platforms like Twitter. People who use Mastodon are often attracted to it because they care about issues like centralization, that most people don't care about. This becomes a filter for the community of individuals who share some common ethos that's not present in mainstream communities. Personally, my reasons for using Mastodon are purely ideological. Companies like Twitter and Facebook go against the very principles of having an open and distributed internet. They centralize power, and get to decide how people interact online. They also create walled gardens that make it difficult for users to move their data between. Each of these platforms locks the users in. With ActivityPub federation, you can have many different platforms interacting with each other seamlessly. For example, Mastodon already federates with PeerTube, so you can post a video on PeerTube and have it show up in your Mastodon timeline. This is something that will never be possible between Twitter and YouTube since they're run by different companies that have no interest in letting their users communicate with each other. I think whether Mastodon can succeed or not is past academic debate at this point. The community has over a million users now, and it's growing actively. Mastodon is very resilient by it's very nature of being open and distributed. A company like Twitter needs to make money to stay afloat, if it doesn't grow then it will go under. This is not the case for Mastodon since it's largely an open source effort, and the core team needs relatively meager amount of money to stay afloat. Meanwhile, the distributed nature means that the cost of running Mastodon is distributed across the community. Instead of one company having to run servers that can support millions of users, you have lots of small instances that each support thousands of users and federate together.