The drive to be a parity product with centralized social media keeps the biggest platforms on the fediverse looking like knock-offs of the most popular commercial platforms that "don't work right". Mastodon being "distributed Twitter" is always going to be limited, because distribution is complicated, jankey, and kind of confusing. And because someone is always going to make a new, centralized, corporate Twitter replacement.

The fediverse cannot win on ease-of-use. In a straight comparison, it's never going to be easier to use. Even if it becomes quasi-centralized (which has been the trend), there are a lot of highly active users who are on alternative platforms, who will never end up on masto.soc or the .worlds.

The current paradigm -- which is mostly being driven by Mastodon, AFAICT -- is platforms with bundled-in default web clients that lack any meaningful customization. There seems to be little selection of, or appetite for, custom themes, and 3rd party clients remain similarly utilitarian. There's very little way for site admins to present any kind of character or set any kind of tone with visual elements. This appears to be purposeful, as it's both a way to provide value to the 'Mastodon' brand, and to encourage the genericization of any given Mastodon-based website, leading to the impression that they're completely interchangeable, and commodifying the thousands of independent small social networking and media sites that make up the fediverse.

As attempted parity platforms, the question of "which server do I sign up on?" is nonsensical. From the end-users perspective, if this is emulating centralized social media, it has already failed. If there's no meaningful distinction between nodes on a homogenized network, I shouldn't have to make this choice. It's weird I'm being asked to do something.

On the other hand, if the fediverse is construct of independently operating small social spaces that just happen to be able to cross-communicate, then there's no reason for them to all look the fucking same. But then we can't "market" "Lemmy" or "Mastodon", because Lemmy and Mastodon are not discrete and containable things like Twitter and Reddit are. They're technologies that power liminal spaces, like Apache HTTP Servers, or WordPress installations are. Imagine trying to sell the World Wide Web to people by having literally every website on it look exactly the same, and trying to get them to 'join Joomla!'.

We can't market a hundred large, generic Lemmy instances, each with c/Politics, c/News, c/VideoGames, etc. on them. We especially can't do that while trying to hold it up as a singular Reddit clone.

The fediverse is not centralized social media. If it's going to have real value and staying power, it's not going to look like centralized social media.

It can't.

It will just get eaten alive by the next shiny, proprietary, VC backed social mobile app if it tries.