Why has Mastodon adoption stalled?

I'm doubting that federation and decentralization ever 'wins' and is anything other than niche.

What might succeed is running something like twitter or reddit as a nonprofit foundation like wikipedia.

This will not make the idealistic free speech advocates happy at all, but would tone down the advertising and monetization and the API could be kept open for third party clients to easily integrate with and use (Obviously it wouldn't eliminate advertisement as the recent issues around wikipedia having $300M in the bank and still begging for money shows, but it is substantially better than reddit or twitter).

What little interesting content for the average Joe there is on mastodon is way too difficult for the average Joe to discover. And social networks need the average Joe to thrive, not just us nerds.

A perspective from someone who doesn't have the latest and greatest browser ... I visit the likes of twitter when someone posts a link to some information ... it displays, not all but those like me can still see the texty stuff ... every Mastodon link ... nah ... oh well no care. This is not an issue with those content to remain contained within the walls of such a place, but if people would like to reference material within it ... well it might matter.

It was just hype. None of those people cared about it. The move was driven by the urge to take down Elon and not anything real

As it turns out, moderation and funding is hard.

just today I saw someone write how more information was available on russia on mastodon than twitter.

Mastodon is great if you need to see what the blob narrative is.