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.
Specifically the massive level of pornbot traffic, and algorithm changes that seem to be intentionally surfacing posts to adversarial users who will then go on the attack.
That they persist must mean that X wants them to persist.
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.
The Digg effect only worked because the majority of users were tech savvy and hated advertisements. The average user just accepts ads for the most part.
Most people don't care about the freedom of the platform, who's running the platform, or the technology behind it. They only care about: Can I easily create an account? Are all my friends, family, people I want to talk to there?