I've been using Mastodon on and off for a few years now and the thing that bugged me was that the benefits it was pushing at first were absolutely uninteresting

I've been using Mastodon on and off for a few years now and the thing that bugged me was that the benefits it was pushing at first were absolutely uninteresting to me as a user: it's decentralized and you can pick your server. Those aren't exactly things a general user is going to care about or even understand. They just want to know how to sign up and follow interesting people. The fact that there wasn't any trending (or usable search) for a while made it also feel like a ghost town. You create your new account and look around and think, "Okay, where's the activity?" I suppose it wasn't really meant to be twitter, so my criticisms may not be entirely fair.