I tried to recruit a friend of mine but the moment I tried to explain instances to him, he zoned out. I wouldn’t call it non-user friendly, but it’s not as simple and dumbed down like other social media is.
Also roughly a year ago there have been a couple of articles thrown around on Twitter and certain subreddits which wrote about CP stuff going on on Mastodon. So the Fediverse had some bad press. Which is rich coming from the site that allowed people like Violentacrez to fester.