What you're proposing won't work for any but the technological elite.
It requires too many technical skills to work.
Alternatively, it requires too much money to hire the technical skills to work.
If it doesn't work for the majority (even a reasonably sized minority) of people, regardless of being borne of the best of intentions, it's not a viable alternative. Period.
What is about Mastodon that requires technical skills that Facebook or Twitter do not? The fact that they are required to know the name of the instance when setting up a client?
Just like they learned (conditioned could be a better word) into putting all their data into their shiny smartphones, people can learn something like "to use this you need your username and the server name, like email addresses". And if you tell me that some people don't even know that and had someone else setting up their facebook for them, why can't this "someone else" set up an ActivityPub client as well?
> Alternatively, it requires too much money to hire the technical skills to work.
I don't think I charged anything from my friends and family that asked to get access to my matrix server. I also don't charge anything from those that got an account on the Jellyfin box I run. I also didn't send an invoice to my wife or parents for helping them setup Element on their phones.
"Ah, but this doesn't scale!"
Sure, if it's just me doing it won't. But there are already other people that learned once and managed to teach others.
> it's not a viable alternative.
Do us both a favor. Instead of making absolute statements based on incomplete information and your prejudices, find a way to prove me wrong.
Get one of your current vices (Twitter? Instagram? TikTok? WhatsApp? iMessage?), and do your best effort to use the open alternatives that exist. For the social networking stuff, you will quickly see that the only "problem" is that the people you are used to seeing are not there. Instead of shrugging your shoulders and going back to the old ways, see how many people you can bring along with you.
I'm not even asking you to delete your current application. I'm just asking you to try to use the open alternative and help as many people as possible to join you. If you find any reasonable justification that prevents you or your peers to adopt the open alternative, then I will believe you.
I don't like to just drop links, but please read https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict... and see if you understand how it applies to what I am proposing.