Spez melting down and accidentally giving us great PR for awhile was maybe… not good enough in itself, eh?
The problem is that for the average user, the Fediverse just doesn’t offer a compelling product. Think about the average, enthusiastic poster on Reddit. While yes, they might be a power user who understands the site and is passionate about it, most (esspecially in smaller communities) users are passionate about what they’re posting about, and just happen to access the community through Reddit. They don’t know nor care about the underlying tech and politics, they just want to talk to others about how to grow tomatoes or what game patch 1.16 means for the meta. These users didn’t care about the Reddit drama. They just kept going as normally as they could, and those who did try were largely met with dead communities anyway, so simply went back to what they were doing before.
The problem is that for the average user, the Fediverse just doesn’t offer a compelling product. Think about the average, enthusiastic poster on Reddit. While yes, they might be a power user who understands the site and is passionate about it, most (esspecially in smaller communities) users are passionate about what they’re posting about, and just happen to access the community through Reddit. They don’t know nor care about the underlying tech and politics, they just want to talk to others about how to grow tomatoes or what game patch 1.16 means for the meta. These users didn’t care about the Reddit drama. They just kept going as normally as they could, and those who did try were largely met with dead communities anyway, so simply went back to what they were doing before.