[mal-2]

My read is it's mostly social, there's a lot of people accustomed to Mastodon and not much interest in exploring other options. There are implementations in Elixir (Pleroma, Akkoma) and work being done in Rust (Calckey, currently node but moving towards a Rust implementation). Mastodon dev team are not particularly open to criticism so my general sense is that admins should choose another project.

[jeremyjh]

Yes, I’ve explored all this but I think Mastodon has won mainly because of its admin functionality, a huge fraction of dev effort is focused on tools to manage content moderation, spam policies and so on. Pleroma has a bad reputation because it was behind on that stuff at one time - maybe still - and a lot of instances had to be blocked because they couldn’t be managed effectively enough. I think it’s easy to underestimate how wide that moat is.

[mal-2]

That's fair, I've heard complaints that mastodon's moderation tools also leave something to be desired but it might still be the best. I haven't been an admin so I can't comment firsthand.