People are giving great answers here. One I didn’t notice at a glance is that the Fediverse is feckin small. Most of the world doesn’t know it exists yet, and centralized social medias are probably not gonna be super big about pushing that info through their algorithms

There are going to be layers to this.

1. There are lots of people who are just downright too stupid. They wouldn’t be on the internet at all if Tim Apple didn’t put it in a baby baba for them to suck it out of. They use Facebook because their iPhone came with the Facebook app pre-installed.

2. There are lots of people for whom popularity is the only thing that exists. Their brain cannot function beyond “Everyone uses Twitter.” They’ll adopt this platform only after everyone else in the world does.

3. There are lots of people who have bought the propaganda. The dark web is for drug traffickers and hitmen, torrenting is for pirates, end-to-end encryption is for traitors, and Mastodon is for Linux neckbeards. You shouldn’t associate with those people.

4. There’s this weird trend where the commercial platforms are becoming hives for conservatives, so they’re probably going to stay put in their echo chambers. I have observed little to no presence of actual conservatives on this platform; beyond the horseshoe effect with the tankie crowd.

5. The culture of content consumption is not supported by the Fediverse. We don’t do algorithmic slop troughs here, and the amount of content on Peertube and Loops rounds down to zero, so it doesn’t fulfill the role of mesmerizing colors and sounds for staring at and drooling like Tiktok does or linear television did.

6. Open source software is usually a bit shit. Be it lack of budget, opinionated developers, redundant projects…we can never have one of something. Why does Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed exist simultaneously? We always end up with software that mostly works, has a lot less graphical polish, a shitty project name, a few missing key features and a couple workarounds you just have to know about. Or an intentionally godawful UI. That’ll put people off.

7. A few people who show up are going to be put off by the weirdest decision they’ll be asked to make this month: “Choose an instance, your choice doesn’t matter, just pick one.” If it doesn’t matter, why make me pick? I bet if you watched 100 people try to sign up for a Fediverse platform, at least 30 of them will balk at that stage. I’ve sat and stared at that for awhile myself and I’m one of the ones who made it through.

8. They just haven’t heard of us. Ask ten people you know in real life if they’ve heard of Lemmy, or Mastodon, or Pixelfed. I bet they haven’t, or if they have they let it pass in one ear and out the other out of apathy.

9. A few people have looked at the Fediverse, didn’t see what they wanted here, and left. If you play Satisfactory, for example, you’ll find an active subreddit where the majority of the player base and the developers of the game interact, on Lemmy you’ll find one community where exactly one person posts “daily screenshots until I get bored.” It’s easy to wander off, especially if you don’t like left wing politics, Linux and the Fediverse itself.

1. Ease of use

The combination of having to choose an instance and then start with an algorithm free blank slate is a tough ask. It literally takes time to sit down and setup your initial “feed”, which is probably a good thing, but not at all what attracts users whimsical curiosities nor what they’ve experienced over their entire existence with social media.

I don’t think federation vs centralization is the primary differentiator. I think corporate vs non-profit/ad-free/donation-only/volunteerism is. Our marketing budget is goose egg. It’s all word-of-mouth.

I asked someone on bluesky i follow what is mastodon lacking that they ultimately chose bluesky, and they said something along the lines “basic ease of use. The way it works is probably perfectly sensible to fediverse people, but I had an awful time there”

They do indeed have (abandoned) mastodon account with posts, so they did try. I don’t know what they meant by it lacking basic ease of use, and I didn’t feel entitled to ask stranger for more explanation. But it wasn’t picking instance, since they already had an account on one of them.

The only thing I personally noticed is off is following people on other instances if you’re not looking at them via your instance website Identity not being perfectly transferrable on mastodon. You can post a special “follow me there instead” post, but what if your instance went tyrant and wouldn’t let you post it? Or just went offline? I think cryptographic identity would be more robust for that, but it would also mean user having to store private key somewhere, which would be even less user-friendly

Is there a TikTok replacement in the Fediverse? The main reason my wife uses it is because the recommendations are the best. Feel like you have to do more self searching here.

Lazy. Most people don’t want to learn how shit works. They just want it to work. They’ll get what they pay for in the end.

edit: downvote all you want. it’s a correct assertion to the question. just because you don’t like it doesn’t make it not correct.

Do you want them here? I don’t. I don’t tell a soul about lemmy, because this is place for me to get away from them. A place for mostly rational discussion, populated by people free thinking enough to seek an alternative. If the masses descended on Lemmy, they’d ruin it like they ruin everything else. They’d draw the attention that would lead to it being litigated, regulated, purchased, corporatized etc. Let them stay on Facebook and Reddit.

Edit: ITT: A bunch of people who haven’t paid attention to how mind bendingly stupid content has become on mainstream social media, or worse yet, actually enjoy the chum pumped out by Facebook and TikTok and want it to come to lemmy as well. I’ll wear my downvotes with pride.

I don’t think the average user thinks much about the platform they’re on, and about who controls it. I think they go to wherever most of their family/friends are.

Also, those platforms are firmly in the mainstream, the alternatives aren’t really - you’d have to actively go search for them. People just aren’t likely to do that, I don’t think.

In my IT program at school, the only people who have heard of the fediverse are the ones I’ve told.

People follow the crowd and centralized media had considerably bigger crowds

Because of network effects.

Building a social network is hard. A typical chicken or egg problem. If you don’t have a user base, nobody is willing to join, and if nobody joins, you don’t have a user base.

It usually requires a bunch of money to build a social network.

The fediverse has a long time to go but I believe it will win sooner or later.

The more people using a social media platform, the more content there is to consume and people to interact with. It’s really hard to move to a new platform when there just isn’t as much stuff to consume as the centralized platforms like Reddit. I’m using Lemmy for ideological reasons, but if you just want to vibe and scroll online, Reddit has way more to offer. That said, the user experience of Reddit is continually degrading. Potentially at some point it will create enough refugees that sites like Lemmy hit an inflection point of users.

Do you know any regular people? Most people I know have never even heard the word fediverse.

Even if people know fediverse, if the content they want doesn’t exist here, they won’t stay.

There are Japanese Twitter refugee to fedi (especially Misskey) several times. A lot of big creator doesn’t stay as they want to get the highest number of engagement to keep their (art) business afloat.