To be brutally honest, mastodon isn’t appealing to average people. Picking a server and client is too complicated, it’s mostly full of FOSS and Linux nerds, and the lack of a good discovery algorithm prevents them from finding content they are interested in.

Unfortunately, average people don’t care about federation. They get confused when they click a link from a different mastodon instance and it’s not the same website. Why aren’t they logged in anymore? They don’t know. Website must be broken. They don’t know or care about the differences between instances and clients and protocols. It’s just an app that they download and don’t see any of their friends or content they care about, so they stop using it.