Technology

Yes. This is the best explanation of why people choose the platforms they use.

I think it's also a lack of tech understanding. I know how easy it is to fork a repo so I get how great the fediverse is with all the services being FOSS and anyone can create an instance. This major benefit makes no sense to someone who doesn't even know what a git repo is or the difference between free (but you are the product being sold) and FOSS.

barrier to entry is higher than that because it first requires you to understand the technology at a base level.

I just don't buy that argument. Email is prolific and virtually no one knows how it works. IMO it comes down to marketing budgets.

I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.

Instead, for-profit ventures are motivated by money to come up with new ideas and push them into the mainstream with their marketing budgets. Then later, the fediverse copies those ideas, often with half-baked approximations that are hard to scale (usually due to bandwidth and/or moderation costs).

people just abandon the old one and join the new popular one. They'll leave when it gets shitty enough and join the new thing

I'm hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse's future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won't fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it's the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as "old reliable".

Right, so we just trade in our relatives for some new ones.

That's the attitude that puts people off.

Even so, if celebrities started using something, their users would follow them - as happened with Bluesky, and to a much smaller extent the Rexodus from Reddit to Lemmy over the 3rd party app debacle.

But there seem to be just too many problems to make it worth most people's efforts. Like lack of content. And speaking of Lemmy, r/RedditAlternatives is full of people that came over here, but then went back - citing lack of content and presence of toxicity as their top reasons.

Or just users being too stupid. I do not see any real problems with AP

You can be anything. Any company. Any person. Any organization. On any platform. Anything.

Thank you for explaining about the relationship=me links.

Email ofc is the same - e.g. BillGates@google.123 just maybe might perhaps not be the same person as BillGates@microsoft.com. Nevertheless, Bluesky makes this stuff trivially easy, as too does Reddit, by virtue of centralization.

So the task would come down to convincing people to prefer more effort on their part vs. less effort somewhere else - while also at the same time doing this on top of all the other criticisms as well (none of my friends are there, there's barely any content, trying to find stuff is so very hard, why do the developers fight amongst themselves leading to an abysmally slow rate of improvements, and basically why should I care about this anymore then, if others likewise can't be bothered to care either?). And the vast majority of people are going to choose the latter over the former.

It's not even necessarily a bad thing, so much as it simply is, and we must make peace with it, or expend effort to overcome it ourselves, bc that's just how the law of entropy works.

In the office that I work in, I'd be surprised if I'd need more than one hand to count how many people would understand this.

I keep seeing this analogy and unfortunately that's not how email servers work so it never really helps honestly. The servers are the To: fields, not the From: fields. And there's also no real analogy about privacy. With most email providers the intent isn't that everyone reads everyone else's email. So frankly I really don't know what insight this is supposed to provide if it doesn't behave like email.

And there's a big safety difference. With something like Bluesky you have to trust the server admins to behave. With ActivityPub you have to trust each and every user of the service. Which is why server admins get shirty about whether they will forward messages to or from other servers. That whole situation doesn't really exist with email. It's not like you have create a Hotmail account because Gmail has decided to defederate with Google or whatever.