For a long time I described it as “imagine 10,000 Twitter clones that can talk to each other.” Which is basically what fedi is. However, that doesn’t really persuade on its own. People are more persuaded by who is on a platform than its features. Google learned this the hard way with Google+ which, at least as far as its features were concerned, objectively better than Facebook’s.

People want to go where they can deal with people they already know or for whatever reason care about. They don’t want to go on fedi or whatever else to meet new people. This is why people will get banned on Twitter a million times and just keep coming back: because all their e-buddies are already on it.

This psychology is very real, and the best way to beat it is a two-step process that almost nobody is going to do:

Become someone worth caring about, either by creating a cool work of art/fiction like a novel, video game, or movie or by becoming somehow newsworthy
Make fedi the best way to get in touch with you

Once they’re on fedi to get in touch with their favorite e-celebs, they’ll then, and only then, start making friends with everybody else. But until the day comes where fediverse users start actually creating reasons for the great outdoors to give a fuck about our opinions, nobody will.