The title I have assigned this article is intentionally boring. The article’s body goes out of its way to not provide simple summaries, silver bullets, or otherwise give a single size fits all answer to everything. The author actually gave it a fun title that, I felt, did a slight disservice to their overall point, but hey, we all make our own decisions.
I thought there was some interesting stuff in there about the Fediverse at large, even if that wasn’t expressly what the author was getting at.
I think the top 3 reasons are, ultimately, the same reason; the people who are already there don’t want you there, and they like the obscurity of discovery and obfuscation of communication, confusion around instances for onboarding, and ability to gatekeep exactly how you’re allowed to use the platform.
There’s issues with the underlying platform, for sure, but the established user base likes it the way it is, and is very strongly invested in preventing change.
And, that’s okay! If you have a platform that you enjoy using, it should be defended, and aggressively.
But, at the same time, you shouldn’t be utterly confused why so many people either don’t want to or bounce right off your platform and aren’t sticky when it’s pretty obvious (and has been for a while) that the culture is the big driver for it.
I don’t want to necessarily gatekeep it, but I don’t want to go back to a centralized algorithmic platform in order to cater to everyone. I’m sure there are some things federated platforms can do to be more approachable, but some of them we shouldn’t do. But Twitter and clones are out there already for people to use–Mastodon doesn’t need to copy them.