I dusted it off a few months back and it was ridiculously simple to set up and use. No idea why it didn't become the go-to when twitter shit the bed. Literally the only reason I'm using bsky is because that's where everyone I follow moved to, but it's just as dogshit as twitter.

For 10 years as of a couple of days ago.

I think a part for the lack of adoption is that people want to be alienated from their service providers. One of the greatest joys of being on Reddit was complaining about the admin and there was plenty to complain about. Doing the same on fedi would feel pretty unkind. And some rando being the controller of your data rather than an anonymous corporation took some getting used to as well.

And some of the evil shit is unfortunately also useful. Do I want Meta to gangstalk me? No. Is it useful that they connect me with everyone I know? Usually yes.

i've never used a microblog site but normies have definitely never heard of mastodon

Humans follow mainstream trends instead of niche alternatives because of the primal fear of staying behind the pack. We are just a bunch of apes who hit each other with bullets and bombs instead of stones and sticks for territory and spreading the genes.

There were a few big waves of people trying out Mastodon when Twitter first started shitting the bed. Everybody likes to blame failed mass adoption on their own particular grievance with the software (most of which are legit tbh) but imo the 'problem' was that it's no good for influencers (due to architectural choices) and most people want to follow influencers.

And there's no way to fix it tbh — you can't have a decentralized network and discoverability on a par with a centralized service. And many existing Mastodon users do not want discoverability anyway.