I have favored federated systems like Mastodon since day one. A huge barrier to adoption is the network effect, encouraging a high enough density of people you interact with to move to something like this, or any of the numerous predecessors over the years. I am uncertain that this will fair any better than App.net, mentioned in the article, or status.net or so many others no longer around.

Source: Mastodon.social is an open-source Twitter competitor that’s growing like crazy – The Verge