People don’t “get” mastodon because they see they have to sign up for another website and their account is tied to there over a centralized “Mastodon.com” (even though mastodon.social is a instance they can use) without realizing all of the separate instances can communicate with each other over activitypub.

They don’t want complicated. They want “hey, this is the thing I liked before everything changed, and it’s attached to my Instagram. Sounds good!”