I'm assuming most of us here want a large community. The reality is most people aren't into technology nearly as much as many of the people actually on the Fediverse. For other people who are into tech (like myself and a lot of people here), the federation technology itself being promoted as a core component of the appeal makes sense, but for your average person? They just don't care, and they shouldn't have to in order to experience the best things about the Fediverse.
Federation, ActivityPub, and even open source are like "buzzwords" to most people. Yet, when I've seen federated software recommended on other social media websites, every article and many times, we tell everyone about the underlying technology first and THEN about how they actually compare to Twitter/Reddit/etc., on a feature basis, as well as about the community of people actually here. It should be the other way around. Why are we telling people about the tech first over the actual social aspect?
This place can't rely solely on mass exoduses from Reddit and Twitter for new members. We've got to get out there and tell people why it's good. Right now, by many people, it's viewed at best as the "Next best thing" and at worst as "over-complicated social media".
People who do come here should learn about the underlying technology and its implications for them. If someone is willing to come here, by all means, tell them about the benefits and drawbacks of the underlying decentralized technology. Understanding how it works is pretty important anyway in the case they'd like to move their account to another instance or view posts from other instances. However, for someone who isn't here, the case can be made that it makes things seem less user-friendly to begin with. Countless times, I've seen people on the Fediverse who still barely understand how federation works. The paralyzing choice of picking an instance to join alone could make someone back away from Mastodon and just stick with Twitter.
Telling them about tech-related things that they don't know about or aren't really interested in doesn't help much. The local artist down the street likely doesn't care about having a deep understanding about federation works or the benefits of decentralized versus centralized social media. They just want somewhere to post their art for others to see and comment on others in their space.
All in all, this post is meant to target our methods of telling people about the Fediverse. We, as a community, have to be better at making this place more user-friendly. This isn't a post to criticize federation and ActivityPub themselves, but rather about how we tell people about the Fediverse through word of mouth.
Meh. It is not a big driver for me. I have been using text based forums since before slashdot. Some were big, like slashdot, most were not.
Personally, massive is not better.
I didn't use reddit because it was huge, I ended up there because to swallowed a few niche forums I used to visit.
Outside the small single interest subs, reddit reminded me of slashdot. I felt like a small voice drowned out by sheer mass of the crowd.
In marketing there is a term USP. Unique Sell Proposition. What does your product have that others do not?
The distributed nature of federated software is its USP.
"Why should I move from reddit/twitter/etc?"
It is social media that allows privacy and stops Corps selling your data is its USP.
If the person you are talking to does not care about the above, they have no reason to move.
You said as much yourself:
The problem is that in all other aspects of social media: ease of use, userbase etc the various flavours of federated social media are last.
TLDR: If the average user does not care about the technical reasons federated social media differs from the rest. They will see no benefit in switching.
Personally, I am a bit sceptical about the long term sustainability and scalability of data storage for data intensive (images and video) federated services.
If they see a large influx of users and usage, the hosting costs are going to rise fast.
Unless the artist you mention is willing to set up and host their own instance and that is another jump beyond getting them to create an account.
Seems like the Fediverse' existence is trying to to send a message at the end of the day. If I were telling somebody about it and stopped as soon as they said the good old "I have nothing to hide" it would be kind of pointless to begin with. Might as well give the whole spill since that phrase likely is to be a given anyway.
I do agree, they are behind the centralized social media. However, I don't think it would help federated social media's case if we didn't at least try to simplify it somewhat and show the appeal.
For images, I suspect that something like this would only be a major issue for federated platforms (besides Pixelfed) in the case of a massive influx of users from another platform all at once. Otherwise, the infrastructure would likely catch up eventually. Kbin, for instance, eventually scaled despite at one point being run by a single person on software absolutely not meant for that many people. Video, on the other hand, I do also feel skeptical about on the Fediverse unless a massive organization were to host an instance.