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.
Evolution of human behaviour is slow. Right now we are all enmeshed in the dawning discovery that the current way we run society is falling apart at the seams. Just enter the core of almost any city in North America and you’ll see what I mean (and not just N. America). It’ll take a while to set itself right, or it may all just burn in a raging nuclear fire launched by a pissed off oligarch who does not get his way.
Definitely not forward progress towards a better day.
The Fediverse is a confusing concept. I’m a giant nerd and even I don’t really understand how this is supposed to work. Centralized platforms provide a more straightforward user experience. And as others have said, that’s where the content is right now.
Because they want to feel involved. They want to be with the in-crowd. If they come to the Fediverse, then they’ll think it’s weird and might scare them because it’s a new concept they can’t grasp. When really, I see the Fediverse as just a social media reset. But because it doesn’t have all of the enshittification that centralized social media has, they don’t dare bother.
Because I have no clue what the Fediverse is.
Yeah and I wasn’t sure what it mean on account creation to commit to a server fully. I ended up getting a lot of supportive comments when I did ask.
Because all their contacts and photos are already there.
I like to follow a couple reporters directly as opposed to subscribing to the local paper and wading through the fluff pieces, so that means using Bluesky.
Back when I was still an artist for my super niche internet garbage, that meant using Tumblr, then after the Tumblr purge, Twitter. Then after Musk, cohost, then after cohost… I mean, I was done with art but I’d probably be on Bluesky for that too.
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
- 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.
network effects
This. And some people just want to post in front of a crowd. So far I like Lemmy because there’s more conversation going on. And less “Look at me!” posts.
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.
Most people are like sheep and just follow the herd.
All but you always get those people that swear they’re different.
In my IT program at school, the only people who have heard of the fediverse are the ones I’ve told.
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.
Yeah I keep pushing for join-lemmy.org to buy ads on Google and Bing.
I can also see some people being opposed to them spending the donation money on ads, since they’d be giving money to companies that may be in opposition to what we’re doing here (or ideological reasons around the advertising industry in general).
Maybe if there was a separate pool of donations specifically for advertising, then people who want to support that can donate to it? Those who don’t can still donate to the projects themselves
Ads on the street (like at bus stops) could work well too
People follow the crowd and centralized media had considerably bigger crowds
Several of these platforms used bots and/or multiple staff accounts to inflate user count/engagement to draw more people in and trigger the network effect.
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.
To add, e.g. reddit took years to become a great platform and it also degradation takes years, as the alternatives will also take years to build. Although some of the issues will probably follow too unless addressed some way. I don’t think the federation is a silver bullet but I’m hopefull that it’s a big step forward.
100%. Lemmy just happens to have the communities I’m interested in.
I remember trying to move to Mastodon years ago. But the main topics in my feed were furries, transgenders and activists.
Not hating on any of those, but it just wasn’t what I was interested in at the time, so I quit the whole microblogging thing altogether and spent more time on Reddit.
