A pretty good portion of my social network moved, myself included. But it fizzled out really quickly and we all ended up back on Twitter.
Every once in a while I'd still get a notification from Ello that someone had followed me. It was always a porn bot, but the email notification was still nostalgic. A part of me is sad the site died.
And to Mastodon before that.
Remember when tech Reddit tried to migrate to Lemmy?
A hardcore handful of people migrate await from the Death Star and stay migrated (maybe a couple hundred medium accounts, and 1 or 2 bigger ones), but everybody else trickles back onto the Death Star eventually.
The only thing that works to get people permanently migrated away is complete enshitification of the existing platform (i.e. Digg effect). Partial enshitification isn't enough.
They are providing a foundation that gets built upon with every migration wave, and I think it’s plausible that they will eventually break into the mainstream.
Put another way, the fediverse is the first alternative that doesn’t need to “succeed” in order for development to continue. It’s a bootstrapped model. And so it can grow quietly, work out the usability kinks over time, and be ready to absorb users whenever they get fed up with the centralized platforms.