just makes mastodon look like a place where nerds reign free and normal folks won’t be able to participate effectively.

I gotta say... that's what the fediverse is (for now), there have been a couple of posts on Lemmy about things being too niche or too nerd oriented (more recently people were talking about the lack of sports), same thing happens on mastodon, if you aren't from a country with enough users, there's basically nothing and it gets worse if you are a normie since most of the current users will be nerds who only talk about linux, their job, inside jokes and memes, some games, keyboard-activism and FOSS

mexican ranting

... and propaganda-users who benefits from the lack of real users from a country to spread their shit and mass-downvote the rest (like lemmy and 🇲🇽)

So whenever a normie searches for something (yes, even the so suggested hashtags) they won't find anything and whatever they post will get buried and ignored, quickly driving them away from it (at least that's what I've observed when it comes to the mexican experience).

And that's without talking about the terrible browsing experience that mastodon provides (ex: wish I could explore another instance's local posts while being logged in from mine).