Whenever I’ve talked to people about Mastodon outside of the tech-savvy spaces, most people just see Mastodon as an app and there are “people on Mastodon”, attempting to try and introduce people to all these different platforms and how you can still talk to everyone in places unfortunately just makes their head explode, as they’re not used to the open web due to how it evolved after the rise of Facebook.

Yeah, I tend to agree with the rest of your post, and I’m highlighting this part because I feel it’s probably one of the biggest missteps so many of the federated platforms have made. It helps to have a couple sort of “demo” instances to help folks understand how it works, but the flagship model that many have taken (e.g. Mastodon.social, Lemmy.ml (at least at first), Pixelfed.social, Calckey/Firefish.social, etc.) has had the unintended effect of somewhat obfuscating the basic distinctive features of the platforms, i.e. distribution/decentralization & federation.

It’s apparent no one has cracked this problem yet, otherwise we wouldn’t have this repeated “misstep” across the platforms, and in this regard I’m no different in terms of not having much of any better ideas. Imo to an extent each of these platforms is in a similar situation to Mastodon in terms of being between a rock & a hard place, but Mastodon definitely moreso than the others simply due to its popularity.