@LianaBrooks absolutely.
It seems to me that one of the main benefits of Mastodon, the fact that I get significantly fewer low-quality interactions compared to my experience a handful of years ago on Twitter*, can also seem like a challenge.
*and Bluesky too, to a degree, though I almost never post on there so it's hard to say
By low-quality interactions, I mean bots and trolls, but also the regular folk who treat the whole thing like a popularity contest or a battleground. There is a tiny fraction of that on (my experience of) Mastodon and that's not just because of fewer overall users, the ratio is drastically different.
This means that I can have decent conversations with decent people who are mostly trying to engage positively, as opposed to the frequently adversarial engagements I experienced before.
However, there's a small corner of my brain that still seems to be impressed by the raw counts regardless of their quality, a part of me that enjoys feeling popular even if I know its an illusion. I've learned to ignore it but I suspect the same sense might chase away a number of new Mastodon users each month.
Of course this is all based on my experience on here, other folks mileage may vary.