A social network does not have to be universally adopted to be interesting because the vast majority of the folks do not do or think anything interesting.

A social network with just the top 1% of the geeks would be absolutely amazing.

They called it a “Trojan horse” they shouldn’t be distracted from. They were stating that it was more likely to fail, which isn’t true. You can challenge that without challenging the idea that mastodon can still be a cool place, no one said they couldn’t.