Threads is polished in a way that Mastodon isn't. I'm part of a few Japanese subcultures and most of them couldn't make heads or tails of the Fediverse despite the existence of Misskey. Threads though? They signed up through Instagram and were posting in minutes. I really want Meta to commit to federation, even if existing Mastodon communities defederate so that techie weirdos like us can live their dreams of running custom clients and interfacing with regular folks (like XMPP federation with GChat back in the day.)

A friend of mine tried mastodon on my recommendation. But he couldn't find a "login with facebook" button, which is how he assesses whether a website is trustworthy. Mastodon to him is "like a scam version of threads". You'd be surprised how prevalent this view is with normal non-hn crowd.

Because there is significantly less friction to the onboarding of Threads, and the significant network effect that Meta is capitalising on

A good chunk of them did, and some of them stuck around. I've had an account going back to 2017, and my feed is far more active today than it was before Elon purchased the site.

Honestly its amazing that as many people went with mastodon as they did.

Ideologically motivated (i.e. "federated-first") open source projects never succeed in attracting mainstream users. They have to make too many compromises, and inevitably prioritize their motivation (federation) over what is necessary to attract the mainstream (e.g. excellent UX).

The fact that mastadon is doing as well as it is, is sign number 1 that the market is begging for something like threads to happen.

Are you that developer-y that you can't understand how terrible that name is? "Hey man, catch you on Mastodon!" It's just so outrageously bad.

The narrative had already been seeded that mastodon is too fractured/difficult. And Threads has the momentum of Facebook/Instagram pushing it forward.