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I think if there's an inflection point for masto adoption going mainstream it'll be when mainstream publications like wired or rolling stone or even newspapers set up their own instances and get their writers on them, maybe with auto cross post to Twitter.
The interesting thing will be how the anti-brand sentiment on here interacts with that..
But if I were still the startup kid I was 10-15 years ago I'd probably be pitching the idea of "white label hosted mastodon for media" to VCs by now.
Related to this, today I saw someone on the birdsite say (paraphrased) "most people don't want mastodon instead of Twitter because they just want to know that what's posted by the BBC is from the BBC" in among a bunch of stuff about how decentralization isn't that important, actually and like...
I'd rather know it came from the BBC because it came from the BBC's domain name than because some rando corp got thrust into the position of deciding who is and isn't real. Decentralization is the solution to this problem, if anything.
@megmac
@martin_hamilton Right? Like, do they not have a browser? Only Twitter? Doesn't the app have a built in browser? How dumbed down for they need it to be?
@joseph8th @megmac I figure the whole server / instance thing is the blocker for a lot of people - pretty alien if all you have ever known is hyperscale properties from the FAANG Zaibatsus
And think of all the second order questions... how do I know which instance is "right" for me / which admins I can trust / if it'll still be around in six months / who to ask for an invite... etc etc. Also now I'm part of the fediverse, why is my timeline full of furries?! 
@martin_hamilton @joseph8th I think preemptive assumptions about what people will or won't tolerate or learn are pointless. If you were around for Twitter's early days there are so many things you could have said similar about.
People go where people are. That's the rule of thumb that matters. The answer to all these questions is just "where their friends/coworkers are" or "where their employer signs them up automatically". They'll learn what they need to in order to talk to who they need to talk to just like they learned to prefix messages with d to dm on Twitter back in the day.
They wouldn't understand a lot of the nuances anymore than they do with email but it turns out that's rarely necessary for things to work.
Imo masto as it exists now is well over the "newbs can use it" hump. It's at least as useable as Twitter was in 2010 or Facebook in 2006 (you had to have a college email!). Quite a bit more if anything. What happens from here is all network effects.
@megmac @martin_hamilton Oh I agree with all of that. It was a breeze to sign up, IMO, but I'm still seeing plenty of complaints from #Qwitters that it's "confusing". On the one hand, that seems kinda pathetic to me, if that's all it takes to confuse that person. On the other hand, as a software engineer, I know for a fact that users will drink from the wrong side of the cup, and spill coffee on themselves. Because users are people, and lots of people are idiots.
@joseph8th @martin_hamilton sure, it's just that the things they find confusing are mostly inherent to the system underlying all of it. It's just normal to be confused when learning, and the answer to that isn't to bend everything to their comfort (though it obviously should bend to some extent).
As things evolve, if mastodon continues to find success, this narrative will shift and it'll be Twitter that will feel alien and strange and constricted.
It already feels weird to go back and have ads interjected into my feed again for eg. I think it's more useful to focus on this sort of thing.
@megmac @martin_hamilton Agreed, again. I don't mean to boost (see what I did there?) those complaints, but rather to take them seriously, and to point out that there are purely client-based UI/UX solutions for them that don't change the backend. Easy fixes... 8 points/medium t-shirt