this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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And people aren't using Mastodon because?
Because while the concept isn't too difficult to understand once it's explained to you, it's not easy as going to "Mastodon and signing up".
The different servers, having to remember other people's instances along with their username (for example, you can't just say "omg check out Jack Froth on Mastodon! He's so funny!", because where? What instance? Who is it?
Not to mention Mastodon, much like Lemmy, dropped the ball hard when it came to onboarding during the peak interest. When you downloaded the app, you had to manually type in your instance, username, and password, which you had to go to an instance in your web browser to sign up for first.
Now Mastodon gives you the option to sign up like a regular app and it'll pick a default server for you. Way more friendly, but no one cares, because they already have the bad confusing taste in their mouth.
Then comes the community. Twitter is extremely toxic, but somehow Lemmy and Mastodon are worse. I know a few people I follow have recently discussed wanting to leave Mastodon because the Mastodon community attacks them, saying they don't want them there, because they have a successful YouTube channel. The type of people that the fediverse attracts are FOSS users, and FOSS users can be really.. particular.
I've been attacked on both Lemmy and Mastodon because I made some pro-windows comments. It's pretty exhausting. The hard pill to swallow is that the fediverse isn't accepting and isn't kind towards "normal" people.
This is just like email, I see no problem here.
I think the problem is about the mindset and the onboarding experience. We've used too much proprietary products and prefer something easy and not too much diverge from the norms. Recently, I tried to advertise Mastodon and Lemmy to my non-techie friends, which are using X and Reddit. Some did try but gave up. They said they didn't understand the concept, and didn't want to bother with choosing an instance in the first place, because they didn't understand the federation concept. It's just hard to explain the benefits of the fediverse to non-techie people.
I have the same observation as your view. Current fediverse communities are heavily towards tech. Some of my friends joined but gradually left because they had a few to no interactions or no interesting people in their interested areas to follow.