I think it’s because businesses tend to focus on super easy access, user interface and user engagement first, while open source projects tend to focus on tech and often forget about the end user experience.
I guess but with mastodon I literally cannot imagine it getting any easier.
Download app -> make an account (the app will default to some instance, at least it did for me) -> use it exactly like Twitter.
As far as I’m aware, the big “problem” with Mastodon (and the Fediverse as a whole) is that you have to choose an instance to join. It’s an aditional step that mainstream social media does not have and it’s already enough to push regular people away. It’s kinda like trying to convince a Windows user to jump ship to Linux, by the time you begin explaining what a distro is you’ve already lost them.
Bluesky:
- Download official, fully featured app and not something utterly crippled
- Looks and feels like Twitter
- No weird tech mumbo-jumbo (WTF is a server, is that like a Discord server, what’s that gotta do with Twitter) confusing you because there are no instances to choose from
- Make an account
- UI, UX, look & feel 100%, 1:1 fully identical with immediate pre-Musk Twitter
- No need to get used to anything because literally everything stays precisely the same as what you’re used to, only that it’s no longer “Twitter” or “X” or “tweets”
- Use it literally precisely the same as Twitter
- Pretend you’re still on Twitter, it won’t make a difference
If Mastodon wanted to compete with this, it would have to
- replace its default Web UI with an even more faithful clone of the immediate pre-Musk Twitter Web UI,
- replace its official app with something that’s absolutely identical to the immediate pre-Musk Twitter app in all but name and branding
- remove the instance chooser without introducing any other option of joining any other instance than mastodon.social
- completely hide decentralisation and instances from newbies, ideally for a few months or years after they’ve joined
- introduce a content-forwarding algorithm like the one on X, but better
- forcibly ban Mastodon’s user-grown culture and force pre-Musk Twitter culture upon everyone
- mollycoddle its users for months or years so that Mastodon really feels like “literally Twitter without Musk” by shielding them from not only all hints that Mastodon is different, but also from the entire rest of the Fediverse