It's not only the break in routine but also the direction of the site. All your examples are productivity products while the fediverse is, in essence, social media. The thing with social media is that branding REALLY matters. There have been attempts to copy Instagram or Snapchat or Reddit but they have all failed to gain massive communities due to not being part of a known brand.

"I posted my pics on the gram"

"What's your snap?" etc....

Kbin, Lemmy, these are just instances of something called the Fediverse, try getting a layperson to understand that.

Social media generally has a rule known as the 90:9:1 rule. 90% of people are lurkers just doomscrolling or passing time, 9% are interacting with content and leaving comments and/or posting, and the final 1% is making the engaging content that sites like Reddit and YouTube are known for.

Right now, FOSS software is often populated by only 10% of that ratio, the power-users and people that interact every so often. Those lurkers, the 90%, migrating them will be hard if not impossible. Remember, they lurk, they will stay where the most engaging content is, and that is still currently Reddit.

Meanwhile I've been messing around with Linux the past week and it got me installing decentralized apps on my android lol.

Yeah, its human nature. Things get better and people come around eventually. Kde plasma is way more continuous from windows 10 then windows 11 is anyway.

I think that for Lemmy and Linux the problem is actually in the people using it. Without people using it, they won't be many posts/good software support. Without the posts/support there won't be many users. It's not some UI being different, or anything else. It's the main issue. When you see lemmy.world frontpage (All, not Local), there are 15 threads about Reddit and Lemmy, 2 about Twitter limits and the rest is about tech. Meanwhile, on r/popular you have variety of communities, still mostly memes and videos but there are also other posts.

It's more about reddit that reddit is. You can't make it long-term with this type of content. On other instances it's more bearable, but it's still not enough to keep people here.