> plenty of people who aren't developers are on Mastodon
How many of them are gonna stick around once their instance goes offline, or the admin does something crazy (which isn't impossible considering how many of these are ran as personal/fun projects by geeks rather than actual businesses), or their instance gets into a feud with the others and results in defederation?
All of this is overhead. It's overhead that can be managed, or you can pay someone to manage it for you, but it's still overhead and extra problems that just don't exist when you can instead sign up for Instagram or Twitter and call it a day.
My person in deity the standard you're defending is the lunatic dumpster fire that is Twitter, where Elon just decides shit at random like "likes are private now" and "you can just pay for a checkmark" or "I'm unbanning all the nazis lol."
I personally haven't experienced any of the "overhead" of Mastodon that you're mentioning, and making seem far more common than it is, but Mastodon seems far more stable than Twitter as a platform and a community at the moment.
And sure, some people might not like it, and that's fine. There are and will always be alternatives. But anything is better than Twitter.
How many of them are gonna stick around once their instance goes offline, or the admin does something crazy (which isn't impossible considering how many of these are ran as personal/fun projects by geeks rather than actual businesses), or their instance gets into a feud with the others and results in defederation?
All of this is overhead. It's overhead that can be managed, or you can pay someone to manage it for you, but it's still overhead and extra problems that just don't exist when you can instead sign up for Instagram or Twitter and call it a day.