I disagree with the argument though. By the same line of reasoning, you could have said in 1997 that Amazon is not a compelling idea because you can already buy books elsewhere. But Amazon allowed you to buy books without the hassle of going to the store. So, without making any predictions about Mastodon, I think that "like X, without the things that make X annoying" is a reasonable pitch if executed correctly.

Comparing buying books online vs at a physical location isn't even in the same universe as retweeting something but without a message attatched

Amazon made it easier to get books; you no longer need to leave your house. What does Mastadon make easier?

To simplify the issue here: Amazon made buying books 10x easier, and expanded the easily purchasable selection by more than 10x.

Mastodon doesn't make anything 10x better or easier. It will never gain mass adoption accordingly. Mainstream users will never care about it, not under any circumstances.

It'll languish as just another techie fantasy, with every other decentralized premise (not one of which has ever acquired mass consumer use, not in decades of trying). It's the standard techie failure to understand average users. The same reason techies for nearly two decades have been baffled as to why average people haven't adopted command-line Linux - they can't be objective and properly put themselves into the shoes of other non-tech people.

>>It's the standard techie failure to understand average users

You mean like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, Shazam, Grubhub, Bell labs, Intel, Xerox Parc, Pixar, Amazon etc, just to name a few (and of course Twitter)? Techies have been doing just fine in the anticipation department.

Except those techies fail all the time. But they are big enough that the fails don't matter on the long run.