Some wars can’t be won. It can be hard to come to terms with this fact when you’re still on the battlefield, but if somehow you manage to step out for a moment, then the truth will become obvious. You have lost, the people on your side have lost, the villains have won and, if anything, you should have run away a long time ago.
Instances aren’t even the biggest pain point for new users (though it’s certainly a big one as much as people insist that it’s easy for anyone to grasp).
The fact that by signing up to mastodon you don’t even get access to all content (every instance has their own block list and federated content) is a massive sticking point. The decentralized nature of mastodon means that you can’t have one uniform experience across the user base, and that’s a huge hindrance to new adoption because people see social media as central squares where everyone is seeing the same thing, but that can’t happen on mastodon by design.
Also, and I’ll die on this hill: the majority of people do not want chronological feeds that they curate themselves. They like recommendations and automatically curated home feeds with the hot new content tailored for them. Any product that only has chronological feeds is DoA when it comes to mass adoption.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the fact you lose everything if your instance goes down (I’ve been through it twice, not fun). This is not actually the case with blue sky, funnily enough, since AT Proto was built specifically to detach your identity from the platform/instance you’re on and carry all your content anywhere.
Insisting that mastodon is easy to use for anyone is delusional. Mastodon, by virtue of being federated, requires you to be a much more conscious user than average. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and some people are happy about having this “normie filter”. I also think that anyone can learn to use mastodon if properly taught, but regardless, it is a massive wall for adoption.
It’s not that people aren’t seriously looking for an alternative (bluesky’s increasing popularity proves this), it’s that mastodon is too antithetical to what people want and expect from a modern social media platform. You can argue if it’s good or bad that mastodon is not following the trends of popular social media, but whether you like it or not, not following said trends is what makes it massively unpopular.
At the end of the day, people just want Twitter without the nazis.