The fediverse (and decentralized social media in general) breaks the mold of extreme ease of use and therefore subverts the cultural expectations, thereby violating one of the ways a user would establish if the application is "good", and thereby it looks "bad".
It's like, technically X algorithm is a superior algo to use. But I can import Algo Joe's library that's 50 years old and already integrated into every language I know, so I'll do Joe.Sort().
Anyways, I see zero evidence that Reddit will come back from this conflagration in any sort of good shape, and I see even less evidence that the VC business model is going to do any better with anything else.
Selective low effort is what those professors exhibit. But their ideas are valuable and worth publicizing.
Twitter is an example of many low-effort scientists writing some good content.
Twitter is also the current textbook example of the problem with low-effort platforms that are controlled by capital. Like, do I even need to explain this to anyone? Are there still any Musk fanboys in the room who think he's playing 4d chess?
But while Twitter circles the drain and the world scrambles to figure out what to use instead, and Mastodon steps up as a competitor which cannot be seized and ruined by capital, ever, Reddit stands firm as the one true platform that got it right! Everyone gazes in awe at the one last hope for the capitalist internet, which seems to be doing just fine.
And Reddit looked over at Twitter, and then Reddit looked down like Rorschach, and said... "Hold my Over 8000 beers..."
Also, reddit’s value is exactly that you have very different demographics on each subreddit, and “hearing the voice” of people is the whole point.
The fediverse is in its early days. Nobody would argue that Reddit.com was "easy to use" in 2007.
As a matter of fact, there's already a Lemmy/Fediverse UX that works just the same as an old-school forum/BB; the whole federation facet is exposed as an extra feature on top of that: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB We know that UX works, because it was quite popular even among novice users.
And yet, every single one of these fediverse discussions is full of people basically saying "This doesn't spoonfeed me with zero effort, I turned it off after ten seconds!"
I have had my Mastodon account since 2017, I posted once and then never really looked again, and then after Twitter imploded and people started using it, I came back. I was an active Twitter user at the time as well, and I just stuck with it for a while, but eventually I just quit using it because there was just no quality interaction on it at all, with people I agree with or otherwise.
I also had kind of a boring Masto feed at first, until I figured out to subscribe to hashtags, and now I have several quality conversations a day about things I'm interested in, with congenial strangers who are also just there to talk about cool stuff. You have to change your habits a bit, it's fine and it's better.
I have also identified a strong tendency in this forum to do very well-outlined explanations of what is difficult or inefficient about federation, but invariably, the problem they're describing exists in a much worse form on the silo'd alternative they are implying we should stick with.