Some people think Mastodon is too weird to become popular:

I joined Twitter in 2008. We had to put a "d" in front of a tweet to convert it to a direct message and every other day you had some embarrassing private moments exposed because someone forgot about the “d”. Hashtags were just a community hack, introduced by Chris Messina to somehow tag content. Search? Hah, you wish! Tweets via SMS were supposed to be a thing. Oh, and the daily meet and greet with the failwhale. Totally not weird.