> Anyway trying to convert people from twitter to mastodon is sorta hard.
That's because going from Twitter to Mastodon is a downgrade in pretty much every concrete way and only an upgrade in less concrete more esoteric terms.
From most people the main benefits I've seen cited are censorship resistance (how many people encounter significant censorship on twitter today?) and decentralization (which only really matters philosophically, to the user on the site the decentralization gets hidden).
On the downsides though there's plenty right on the surface for users: limited users (like all social networks if the people you want to interact with aren't there it's useless), mediocre default layout (the 3 column default doesn't make good use of space and give equal importance to everything cramping the main thing you want to see the toots) and discovery (the main way I've found people to follow on Mastodon? finding them on twitter where I already follow them and seeing they're on Mastodon too).
To a random user who doesn't really encounter censorship on twitter or care about decentralized/federated networks it's just a sub-par version of Twitter with a worse interface, a sparser social graph and longer handles.
