The trouble with Mastodon that I’ve seen (on Twitter) is folks are a bit confused with its federated nature. They’re not sure which server to use nor the “rules” governing that server.

Mastodon is really better suited as a collection of smaller communities much like Reddit's r/ forums then for one “universal” platform.

It’s already had some scaling issues with folks trying to use it as well.

Key technical decisions made early on kneecap its ability to be performant and to scale to anything approaching Twitter's userbase size, if instances want to still be part of the fediverse.

As far as I know, Mastodon is a federated system, so there‘s no mechanism to have an algorithm pick certain content and massively boost its distribution across the network.