For comparison:
Mastodon is 6 years old and grew out of a university student project. Per GitHub data, it currently has 2 consistently full-time devs, including the project founder, and 1 part-time. It is being funded out of a 31k USD/mo Patreon, and until recently was closer to 20k, which is used to pay for development, hosting of two large instances, and moderation.
Mastodon has had less funding than Block Party and is being compared to Twitter. Give it funding and time and it will catch up.