In some of the music communities I’m in the content creators are already telling their userbase to go follow them on threads. They’re all talking about some kind of beef between Elon and Mark and the possibility of a boxing match… Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.
People do, but ease of use will trump it every time.
It’s a bit of a shock that simply picking an instance and signing up like any regular site is such a hurdle to so many people.
I think in Mastodon’s case it was less that you had to pick an instance, rather they were all instances from companies/people that they didn’t know. How many email providers does the average person know? The “my Mastodon admin can read all my posts” discussion also fits into this (they were fine with Twitter doing it). Threads will behave just like any other service in the Fediverse at the end, with all that “complexity”, but people will say Threads is easier, just because of the recognition factor and that they already have an Instagram account.
That last bit is part of it. One Instagram account means full access, full interaction. If you don’t have one there’s no approval process, either.
Plus it looks more fleshed out. Let’s face it, a clean and at least vaguely clear UI is far more trustworthy for 99% of people than a possibly sketchy one that seems to almost overcommunicate as far as they’re concerned.
Oh, and speaking of UI, the only app I have for Lemmy on iOS is through Testflight. Most people don’t have, want, or even need a desktop so if there’s no phone app then literally nothing else matters and that’s fair.
That’s the key, you have to figure out what instance is best for you. With a million choices you get choice paralysis mixed with FOMO and they just don’t bother.
IMO that’s probably the biggest problem with anything decentralized like this. The average person doesn’t care about the benefits and the above is by far a big barrier to entry.