Gregory's Server@cadey FWIW, the onboarding experience (instance choice blindness and the "wait, why can't I like this post I was sent a link to? (because it's a link to a different instance than your account is on, and Mastodon doesn't handle this super gracefully)" are still some technical barriers to entry.
There are unfortunately a lot of people who don't understand technology, and gravitate to the centralized platforms because they "just work." Perhaps this is a problem deeper rooted in our lack of technology education, but still, it exists.
@Bytewave @cadey It's not just tech education, it's how our devices work and how the web is designed - most people learn while using and corporate social media is explicitly set up to remove the user choice and explicit feed curation that was standard under Web 1.0 (and even 2.0).