I can kinda get it. There are tons of servers, all with different rules, and I'm guessing some don't federate with eachother. I compared ~20 servers rules and how fast they loaded before chosing one.

Search sucks. Home feed is only chronological, so you need be careful about who you follow. I.e. if you follow someone that posts important stuff, but only weekly, it will get drowned out by following people that post every hour. Then there's the weird design issue that all replies aren't necessarily synced between servers, which is unituitive.

Mastodon needs to implement some kind of better search, and a better algorithm for the home feed, and make it the default.

Journalists are just going to go where the most people are because it's their job to self-promote.