> The FSF really needs better marketing and prioritization. Imagine how much time and attention they spent just fighting the Linux vs GNU/Linux debate, something that essentially no one cares about.

And yet almost everyone I know in tech knows about it, even my non-tech friends that use mastodon and pleroma have heard jokes about it. So given the exposure it's got them, it was pretty good for marketing.

Given the point of Mastodon I'd wager quite strongly that the Venn diagram of users of Mastodon and those who are likely to have heard an anecdote about the FSF overlap by quite a way.

I could be wrong on that, but my personal anecdata is that noone who doesn't already care about free software is really aware of their message about free software.

Sure, but that doesn't mean that those users care about free software, and most of the mastodon instances don't really advertise GNUisms. Especially for people only joining because their friends have left twitter for the fediverse

"non-tech friends that use mastodon" suggests that you are using a definition of "non-tech" many people would not recognize.

Most of the people I see on mastodon are queer people that are not interested in programming or computer science and know maybe what GNU/Linux is but not know what Linux or GNU is. Signing up to a mastodon and pleroma instance is as painless as joining twitter (less painless, actually), and using it is the same. There was a mass migration of queer people a year or so back due to twitter's repeated banning of people who disagree with TERFs, but not the actual harassing TERFS themselves. There have been a couple more migrations since. Queer Twitter Culture is very tightknit -- moreso than tech culture -- and that's not including the three handshakes rule of thumb.

Some anecdata: My ex, whose parent is interested in computers but she herself does not have much of an interest and only barely knows what Linux is, joined mastodon before me, and the majority of her three hundred-odd follows do not know what Linux is.

Most cishet groups don't have a clue about mastodon or won't budge from facebook because they don't have a reason. The blatantly fascist-supporting twitter moderators, and the hostility of facebook's real name policy has given that incentive to queer people.