It's my claim that for all the work that goes into Mastodon, Solid, etc, none of them will truly succeed without the ability for programmers themselves to effectively put them into practice on static sites, especially those associated with their GitHub profile using GitHub Pages. (I despise GitHub, FWIW, and really hate that so much of the world of development has settled there, but I can know what I know from seeing what I see.) When it's simple enough to do that, that's the point where non-niche productized services for non-programmers to do the same will start popping up and off-Twitter chatter will take off. Despite the inroads that Mastodon has made, I don't consider in non-niche; it's being held back by the same factors described here.