I tried with Masto, I really did. I even self-hosted for a while. But the problem it has in my humble and not hugely technical opinion is: 1) it’s complicated

I tried with Masto, I really did. I even self-hosted for a while. But the problem it has in my humble and not hugely technical opinion is: 1) it’s complicated (learning about why your server wasn’t federating with another was not what I needed when I just wanted to toot about my lunch), 2) there’s no (global) search, which makes it awful for discoverability, 3) the theory of portability is b/s - when I moved from self hosted to .social because of the horror of self-hosting it turns out you lose your history. Or at least it did back when I did it. So the only “portable” thing is just a small part of the package, ie not really portable at all. The other “network effect” in play here is that there’s only one viable place for masto accounts and that’s .social - and if everyone is flocking towards a single place with a single owner then the tech being federated still fails in the face of enshittification when the instance or instance owner goes bad. TB and CD’s points are spot on - but Masto / federation needs some serious work on the usability side before anyone approaching a “normal” (non-geek) user is going to find this a serious contender to X or any of the others.