> Turns out the biggest challenge was not in getting users, but in convincing admins to join the network

The incentives for homeserver admins are extremely perverted and it's why the Mastodon network in particular is so dominated by ideological cliques.

Running a homeserver is thankless, laborious, and expensive, and the costs go up with each user. There's no money for it, so admins have to be compensated another way. Either they get off on the power, or have an ideological axe to grind and thus moral compensation, or they are altruistic and eventually burn out when they are subjected to the abuse of the job.

The financial story has to be solved. Admins must be paid to run services or the services get distorted to compensate them some other way.