@antichrist_hater @Zergling_man >most of the network is a small number of instances where most of the users are
that's just blatantly wrong though, i think it's just your personal looking glass of who you follow and interact with, especially from SPC which is a large instance that is also blocked by a lot of other big instances for very various reasons (so there's a lot you'll never see from there)
i can assure you from my timeline here that most of the people i interact with are from quite small instances; if you consider poast + baest + spc + fse + mastosoc to be fedi then it's just misguided, stats and usages particularly show otherwise, and my instance's peering list (or any federation stats from a Misskey/Foundkey/etc instance) would show how wrong that is

>The software just has to be good enough in order to justify moving to it
yes, and in 99% of cases, it isn't good enough. mastodon was good enough for people to move to it, pleroma too, but even in those cases, GNU Social compatibility was kept as a pseudo-transition period. those are exceptions.