The medium is better for expressing thoughts (you can write a decent-sized blog post in a single Mastodon post). It has most of the effective bits of Twitter, and many of the effective bits of the peak, RSS-soaked blogosphere. If the tooling gets better, I can see it being better than the golden age of Google Reader.
It also makes sense that you can stand up your own Mastodon, in the same sense as you could stand up WordPress back in the day. Most people won't, but the fact that you can, and that the ability to do so is baked into protocol, keeps development interesting. It also makes it more interesting for third party clients, which Twitter has spent the last decade trying to eradicate. So that's a second (and probably third) reason.
Perhaps ironically, these are also reasons that I think the norms of the "fediverse" aren't going to matter in the long term. I think the software approach is important, and the notion of a single "decentralized social network" is not.
It also makes sense that you can stand up your own Mastodon, in the same sense as you could stand up WordPress back in the day. Most people won't, but the fact that you can, and that the ability to do so is baked into protocol, keeps development interesting. It also makes it more interesting for third party clients, which Twitter has spent the last decade trying to eradicate. So that's a second (and probably third) reason.
Perhaps ironically, these are also reasons that I think the norms of the "fediverse" aren't going to matter in the long term. I think the software approach is important, and the notion of a single "decentralized social network" is not.