The thing is, most of them are looking to Threads and BlueSky because that is where the majority of normie non technical people are going to go. It will also give them a far bigger outreach of having their art seen and noticed by bigger groups of people.

But mastodon also suffers because the second biggest instance, pawoo.net l, leaves many people with a bad experience since they host rampant amounts of pedophilic content and fetishists galore and a lot of mastodon instances defederate from it because of it’s peoblems.

I left that instance when I got hit with some of that content, disturbing to say the least… I left for the much better packmates.org mastodon instance (hosted by our yiffit admin @Wander@yiffit.net )

Pawoo was meant as a tie in to the Japanese art gallery site pixiv but even though it still has those tie ins, it’s been sold off multiple times. And the current owners will not do anything to curve the pedophilic content on it

Pawoo is one of the biggest black eyes for mastodon and probably hurts it when people are deciding to use mastodon, threads, or bluesky.

Remember how people said that from millenials onwards every generation will be skilled in tech? It so happens that gen-z actually ranks lower in advanced tech skills. Gen-Z learned to use tech, but not to understand it as much as those of us who experienced the early-to-mid internet and computers.

As such there’s a large amount of people who don’t know or understand the pros of decentralized platforms like Mastodon. And of course, there’s also the artists who need to follow the masses because they make a living out of it.

I’m oversimplifying things a lot, but if you grew up discovering the internet through your parents’ ipad, there’s a higher chance that the corporate internet has a much strong impact / incentive for you.