Ask Lemmy
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(1) Network effects. People want to use social media that everyone else is using. Once a site achieves a critical mass of users it becomes the obvious choice to join. It also becomes difficult to leave because if you have built up a personal network on most sites, you can’t take it with you.
(2) Convenience. Most sites don’t require a lot of effort to use. In the past few years this one has surprised me a bit. The level of effort most people are willing to put in to trying a new site is basically 0. Using something like lemmy requires you to read a few paragraphs and make a decision about a home instance. That is too much effort for a lot of people.
For convenience, it also doesn't help that OSS is extremely hit and miss and inconsistent between developers.
This includes:
At the end of the day, regular people want something that just works™. They don't want to have to dig through ~~ancient tomes~~ old form posts to figure out that a depreciated version of an app has been supersceeded by a slightly differently named version by a completely different dev that requires some weird dependencies that conflict with another app's dependencies and everything just breaks at some point... It's a pain in the ass.
Social media networks without attention based algorithms also aren't quite as addictive.
Hell, it isn't even a major decision since moving instances is so easy now. Yes, it impacts the initial experience, but every social media app starts with a default experience and usage refines it from there.