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?
The dominant theory seems to be ease of use/simplicity and the front page of everything having furries, hentai and a bunch of nerd chat.
I think a good way to solve a few of the issues is to have the main instance of each platform market themselves a little harder and not so much on the pods/instances - teach that to the people later after they get in to the atmosphere of the Fediverse. For example, someone goes to Mastodon.social, all they see is that it’s the main instance, and other that the word instance, it looks like a simple Twitter alternative.
Then later if they want to delve a little deeper (the customer), they can learn about instances/pods. From there they can host their own, or search for a new one. (Most of the instance directories could use some simplifying too)
Then to go along with that, each main instance would also have to be moderated quite heavily to keep things clean for when people first join.
Thoughts?
That would require easier instance switching (like nomadic identities on Hubzilla). But also the very idea of a “main” instance is counter-productive. The current theme based instances is a better idea to cater to the current niche audiences.
Maybe in the future there could also be more mainstream regional instances. Something similar to your regional/city newspaper, where it is more about local content and localized exchange.
Either that or the server directories would need to be made easier to work with, perhaps all on one Fediverse directory website??