>without a UX that abstracts away the siloed nature of federated instances

Can you be more specific? Only thing I found missing was "Quote Posts" and almost everyone seems to agree that it was the right decision to make.

> will prevent Mastodon from ever growing beyond a small niche

And its not a good thing? "There's an instance for everything" is fast becoming an reality, Let those instances be small as its managed by volunteers;

There's no need for everything to grow into a democracy destroying scale, Especially Social Media platforms.

that posters cannot reach an audience beyond their own server. the point of a microblogging platform is to create and consume content, but who wants to publish to a platform that doesn’t have the largest potential reach? and if the best content creators aren’t on the platform, why would the consumers be?

Have you considered that not everyone wants to be an influencer on Social Media?

Some might just want to have a social interaction with like minded people, I'm one of them and Mastodon has been perfect for it.

I have a 14 year old Twitter account, Apart from the first few years when Twitter was actually like Mastodon with friends fooling around I never felt happy browsing Twitter; It has become an algorithm enforced narcissism universe with everyone trying to sell something or themselves.