It's important to note that my experience is from a year ago, and I imagine a lot has changed. Part of my issue at the time was that I couldn't see things like who people I followed were following because they were on a different server, which made discovery challenging. Also very few people who I followed on the bird site went to Mastodon.

I'm not saying the platform can't work or that the barriers make it unusable, just that the draw wasn't there to warrant the investment in learning a more complex platform than the alternatives.