This is sad to see. Mastodon is already dead. It's fundamentally impossible for it to catch on with a wider audience. Right now the only platform worse than Twitter is Mastodon. Whatever the Twitter replacement is, we haven't found it yet.
But there still has to be infrastructure. Instead of reinventing the wheel, a new social network could be built on the Mastodon foundation. There would already be users and there would be an exit strategy for power users if the new network fails. Right now, it's not worth investing time in a new network because the social graph doesn't survive the end of the network. With Mastodon, it would be easy to migrate to a new service.
In fact, everyone here complaining about how the platform won't put up with their edgy anti-woke shenanigans should just stay away. You're all too smart and cool for such a lame place.