> It works until it doesn’t: when the host of a centralized community decides to make enemies with its users.

And yet in spite of this very thing happening, Lemmy and Mastodon remain largely unadopted.

Diaspora* existed during the Digg implosion and where did people flock to? No, not the decentralized Fediverse, but to another centralized service. Because it meets their needs. Their needs from a product _aren't_ that it be decentralized. Their needs are that it is easily accessible, that information is easily indexed and searchable, that interacting with users is obvious and transparent, etc.

These are all needs that Fediverse products have not met well because they're too focused on their agenda and their ideology, not their product.

Some people have had enough. People are still using Reddit despite the blackouts. We'll see how much mass migration there is. Even if Reddit goes the route of Digg, how do you know another centralized site won't take it's place?

I'm with you 100% on the goal here, what fediverse skeptics like me keep trying to point out is that it's not going to work if you first require every user to learn nerd stuff. Most people are part of multiple communities, some which overlap and some which do not. The whole process of choosing an instance in order to figure out the fediverse is broken, because it assumes people one-dimensional, and forces them into making a fundamentally meaningless choice as their first user experience.

It's based on a metaphor of the body in a physical place, that doesn't really work online. As I mentioned in another comment, this is like offering to give someone a ticket to an exciting foreign city, but before they can get the ticket they have to choose where they're going to eat lunch when they arrive. This alienates people because they have no context for choosing between instances so forcing this choice on them as a condition of signing up is good way to maximize your bounce rate.