This is probably true. But how long should we wait for the fediverse to get its act together? There’s a critical mass of people who want to leave Twitter and lots of pent up demand.
My first testing of the waters in the fediverse was about a year ago and I ended up looking at lots of "also on mastodon" variants of Twitter accounts I liked to read. Only slowly I realized that most of those weren't "I'm also on mastodon" operated by the same people but passive mirrors, most not even operated by someone in any way related to the original account. On paper that looks good, "hey, you can also follow x, y and z on mastodon!" but in reality the feeling of merely looking at shadows was extremely present, almost like in plato's cave. Now that Twitter is trying hard to silence the APIs of sneaking behind those "shadows", my mastodon feels much better. It's almost as if Musk fixed a huge mastodon bug.
It's been working just fine for years. The people don't want a platform they have to genuinely participate in. They want celebrities, corporations and their data to be stolen and sold to see it as a successful platform for mindlessly browsing.
Are you implying that the fediverse failed because the builders of the main apps don’t understand the market, that they’re unwilling to give people what they want out of a platform, or something else?
I don't think the fediverse failed. I think the average joe doesn't sign up for Mastodon and Kbin because it doesn't have celebrities, corporations, ads and data harvesting. Celebrities and corporations needs to be paid, at least initially, to be on the platform which a decentralized platform is never going to do.
I can confirm that when I’m shopping at WalMart and polling average Joes on why they aren’t joining Mastodon, one of the top reasons they cite is the lack of data harvesting, followed closely by the lack of ads. Perhaps the fediverse can avoid the fate you’re predicting if they add in maybe just a little data harvesting?
Celebrities get a lot out of these platforms without having to be paid. They get everything that us normies do (because, ultimately, celebrities are people too) PLUS they get all the promotional advantages, a direct feedback loop (which many crave, despite claims to the contrary), etc.
Most celebrities didn't need to be paid to get an email address.
