I think there's value in Mastodon, but it's not a drop-in twitter replacement. Perhaps a valuable thing would be helping set it up as a POSSE tool: https://indieweb.org/POSSE - post to your Mastodon and it automatically posts to Twitter for you.
I'm still using it because Windows requires accounts now and screw that, but man, Linux has tried hard to get me to go do something else.
I do not understand how these projects are just so consistently bad at UX. It takes effort, but UX should be priority number one, even over new functionality.
Of course trying to install drivers for a 56k modem while not having internet access was a different experience 25 years ago.
Where they fall off the rails is when you try to do something you're "not supposed to do" (like removing python) - then you're often better off with the weird distros like Gentoo or Mint; at least someone likely broke it the same way before.
for better or worse its probably one of the larger reasons our projects are so locked into corporate influence.