It's so painful to use. It's such a waste they're winning the network effect battle off of Twitter's collapse. Not that I have a better alternative (open to suggestions).
Mastodon is the protocol. You can't really quit "Twitter" by joining "email", for example. It doesn't make sense.
Now maybe you can "quit Twitter" to join "Gmail", which is an email service. Similarly, people are going to have to pick Mastodon servers that work with them the best.
Tumblr seems to be the weird one (promising ActivityPub, aka Mastodon, support soon). Tumblr seems to be my personal best bet, but I'm also open to suggestions.
ActivityPub is the protocol, Mastodon is an implementation of that protocol. There are other services built on ActivityPub that can interop with Mastodon, which is part of what makes the whole system awesome.
Yes, the protocol is terrible, which plays a major role in the UX. And yes, the semantics game is very fun to play with Mastodon, but people say they're quitting Twitter for Mastodon all the time and we all know what it means.
The charitable reading is that a lot of people are saying "Mastodon" when they mean the "Fediverse" (the large collection of mostly inter-communicating servers running an instance of the software).
