I’ve thought about it a bit and the Fediverse has been around for a while now. There are some really cool applications being made to replace the mainstream ones, but they just aren’t taking off.
Why do you guys think that might be? Ease of use? Addiction to the mainstream platforms? Lack of marketing?
Radical right-wing people think it’s a cesspool of leftists and flock to platforms like Gab (which is Nazi twitter).
Many other people just don’t know what the fediverse is.
It’s also too complicated. People are not using protocols (what ActivityPub/Fediverse is) but platforms. They don’t use “federated lemmy”, they use Twitter, Facebook and other centralised platforms. It’s way too complicated to understand what federation is.
One thing we’re trying to do with lemmy, is to make it user friendly and content-focused enough that you don’t even need to know what federation is to make an account and start using it. Even without federation, its just a lean, self-hostable reddit alternative. Whether federation can be a successful way to get people off these giant platforms remains to be seen, but the user experience does have to be there first.