Yep, this person nails the primary issue. Distributed or federated social networking won’t take off until we have a worthwhile self-sovereign identity solution, aka BYOID (Bring Your Own Identity), where the sole controller of the identity is the individual with the private key.

It’s a very difficult problem to solve and to turn into something easy to use for the masses… but it’s required for such applications as Mastodon to truly be enticing.

As-is, we should not expect Mastodon (or similar systems) to gain much traction outside of a few niches.