People moving to Mastodon fall into two groups, by and large - people who like it for normative reasons, and people moving there to see what the buzz is about. The first group sees practical concerns as an obstacle to be defeated; they would say you ought to move to Mastodon regardless of technical problems or lack of utility. The second isn't defending it in offsite discussion board.

In terms of utility for social networking, there's no defending Mastodon relative to a Facebook or Twitter. The small userbase is reason enough not to switch; what use is a social networking site if the people you want to interact with aren't on it?

That there are so few if any people who both recommend Mastodon and don't have moral/political objections to Twitter is damning. Where are the objectors who recommend it on purely descriptive grounds? It's a bit like GNU - it's cool, but don't try to tell people it's a viable replacement for Windows.