-Money for a big marketing campaign, and reaching famous people.
-A better first comer UX.
First one is hard to solve. But UX in Mastodon should be solved. Local and federated feeds are useless, specially on the "default" .social instance. They need to find a way for new users to be able to see a relevant feed of toots and to have an easier time finding people they'd like to interact with.
It is a solvable problem, I hope someday it could be done.
I like the idea of the local feed, especially for smaller, less generalized instances, but the default should definitely be federated and the wording could also be changed if only because the word "federated" would probably be confusing to non-technical people. Replacing it with something like "All" might be a better idea