Sorry but I have to disagree. Most connections most people have on social media are with those they already know. This is what Mastodon ignores. Mastodon assume

Sorry but I have to disagree. Most connections most people have on social media are with those they already know. This is what Mastodon ignores. Mastodon assumes you want to follow random like-minded people, but offers absolutely no tools for the overwhelmingly more relevant use case of finding your existing friends in the fediverse and following them. In other words, it offers no sensible way to bootstrap your network. This leads to a weird UX: you pick an instance, you sign up, you flip through the onboarding, and now what? This lack of discernible way forward drives people away. They sign up, play with it for a bit, like some cat pictures Eugen boosts, and abandon their account. Virtually all social services that had any semblance of success offered at least one of two ways to bootstrap your network when you signed up: a global search of some sort, or importing your contact list form somewhere else (Facebook/Twitter, phonebook, etc). Mastodon offers none. Now, I understand that it's a technical challenge to have anything resembling globally-searchable account directory in a decentralized environment, but it's certainly solvable. I'm thinking of DHT for my fediverse project for example.