You might be assuming that people interested in being on the fediverse have the goal of excessive reach. I acknowledge that some coming over from twitter might be interested in such a goal....but those individuals might simply not fully understand the compelling value that the fediverse (and mastodon instances) often represent. Not everyone wants/needs to reach 100M people.

- While, twitter (& other commercial socials) promise excessive/massive reach...The Fediverse might offer less, but richer interactions.

- While, twitter (& other commercial socials) promise users as cattle/"eyeballs" to ad buyers...The Fediverse offers none of that. (Though, individual instancves have every right and possibility if they so choose to create their own ecosystem of ads to pay for their operations, and their people would need to know that of course)

- While, twitter (& other commercial socials) promise a platform for creators to publish their content to a wide audience...The Fediverse offers the same publishing (or better) capabilities and tools, but to a smaller audience...and, at least the existing creators on the Fedi are quite cool with that; most prefer it that way!

To me, living on the Fedi, is like people purposefully, willfully, happily (and not accidentally nor due to duress) moving to the rural country away from the big city...and not caring that others feel like "hey, the big city living is where everything is awesome" ;-)

You're right but also you're discounting the value of the Twitter model. Twitter sells eyeballs, but they also give away reach to creators. Politicians may use the platform to amplify nonsense but a lot of them use the platform for good as well. Same with journalists which is the primary reason I'm there. It's easy to follow the kind of people I'm interested in hearing more from and they're all in one place. Looking at ads is the price paid for a free service with adequate moderation. For personal connections or interest groups, there's no shortage of existing platforms that do the job better than Mastodon.

> 99% of the value of Twitter is its reach.

For marketers, politicians and others that use Twitter as a megaphone for their personal brand.

Everybody else just wants to see funny memes, cat pictures and occasionally have the small topic conversations that make Twitter occasionally worth it.

Reddit is better at that than Mastodon