Also bluntly, her background of being Chinese and Swiss is a good look if they plan on marketing internationally. Her age probably plays a big role. No one wants to follow a company with a CEO that’s too old or too young.
You mean not cis straight white old western male, got it.
having them understand what a “federated platform” is, is too much to ask
Email is the usual analogy.
trying to find a Mastodon instance to make an account on was irritating.
Your average person will just land on mastodon.social without bothering to read the TOS... i mean rules, you know that.
And you missed a real key argument: network effect. If average person's friends are on platform XYZ, that's where average person will be (although this is stronger with messengers).
Mastodon gives you an autoscrolling firehose of unfiltered junk on all, or an empty wasteland of subscribed tags, with nothing inbetween.
If only people make an effort... most mastodon clients allow you to configure the timelines and if you have an empty wasteland of subscribed tags well, you're subscribed to some very niche stuff... try posting about it, maybe others are listening - that implies effort, though, so be careful.
Echo chambers are on par with human nature: we fear the unknown and flock to like-minded people. It takes a degree of discomfort to read something you don't agree with (explained rationally and with civility) and trying to argument in kind - it's easier to down-vote and here we are...
One of us.