[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.