Change is hard for most people. When much of the world runs on Android/Google and Mac/iPhone its hard to convince people to switch. Hell, it’s hard to switch when you actually do want to leave because the infrastructure is so proprietary and locked in. I’m in the process of de-googling my phone but i use Google applications for work, so its been difficult. Not impossible, but very difficult.

Bringing more people would ruin these platforms just as they ruined the other platforms.

I’m reasonably confident that the reason has a lot to do with social proof. I don’t think it has much to do with UX, or amount of content, because both of those reasons would require people to actually try the fediverse to find out. In my experience, people don’t cite reasons as to why they won’t try a lesser-known platform, they enter a low-key fight-or-flight mode and sort of go blank, shut down, and don’t engage with the idea either way. It’s kind of spooky once you notice it in person.

To speculate, I think perhaps centralized, corporate services have an immediate advantage, because a brand name and a logo inherently provides a certain amount of social proof, since corporate brands and logos are so central to Western culture.

I think that it would be easier for them to give up social media completely than to move somewhere else without people.

The only way would be to have something there that they need or want and then tell them to make an account in a specific place, no choosing instances bullshit, they’ll figure it out eventually if they’re interested.

(1) Network effects. People want to use social media that everyone else is using. Once a site achieves a critical mass of users it becomes the obvious choice to join. It also becomes difficult to leave because if you have built up a personal network on most sites, you can’t take it with you.

(2) Convenience. Most sites don’t require a lot of effort to use. In the past few years this one has surprised me a bit. The level of effort most people are willing to put in to trying a new site is basically 0. Using something like lemmy requires you to read a few paragraphs and make a decision about a home instance. That is too much effort for a lot of people.

I saw a post about Upscrolled and commented that people should stop joining centralised social media because they all end up the same way, and I got a downvote. On Lemmy.

My friends were all excited about bluesky when that launched, and I told them to join the fediverse because bluesky was just Early Twitter. They didn’t listen, then bluesky welcomed ICE. Now they’re excited about upscrolled, and I told them to join the Fediverse, and they still aren’t listening.

All of which is to say, I have no fuckin idea my guy. People are weird.

A lot of great comments, but another one that’s not mentioned: money and advertising

Open source / non profit run websites don’t have money to burn on mobile ads, and many wouldn’t want to put money into the ad industry even if they did.

It doesn’t guarantee users, plenty of startups fail after promotional campaigns, but it definitely helps people learn about the platform

Well, often they are just not as good and active. Most people care about content and service more than principles.

I was watching a livestream the other day by someone who appears intelligent and knowledgeable enough to know that she should probably give up Windows and use Linux instead. So far as I could tell there isn’t really any reason why she shouldn’t. It was the kind of stream where she had plenty of time to just talk freely about whatever was on her mind, and usually that’s nothing to do with computers or their operating systems. But she was thinking of doing it. She worries about this and that. She wonders if OBS will work as well, she imagines it would be a lot of work, she seems unsure that her tech skills would be good enough, she worries that it might go wrong, that it might not be worth it, that she might pick the wrong distro, that her webcam wouldn’t work, that it might be a colossal waste of time for very little benefit.

People unaccustomed to software freedom find it hard to understand how it would benefit them. People are afraid of change.

People do not care about decentralization and privacy that is the harsh reality. The best way to promote privacy is to not talk about privacy and provide concrete advantages and unique feature.

Most people moved to Cara not pixelfed. Most people moved to upscrolled not loops.

Also the marketing is terrible. The fediverse creators should go to tech podcast, contact tech medias, participating to general tech events etc

The public LOVES easy options

Social media only matters if there’s people there. How can you convince someone of jumping ship to an empty place?

In addition to the points the other posts have made, I think we’ve been conditioned to believe that cost = quality, “you get what you pay for.”

It’s always contents. Being open source or decentralised is never the sole thing that convinces someone to use them. Same reason why people avoid hexbear even though it’s open source, or Truth social even though it’s based on Mastodon.

Everyone wants to be where everyone else is at.