I mean, sure, you can chase MAU numbers all you want (please don’t). The reality is that people are too lazy, busy, or overwhelmed to invest even two minutes’ thought/effort (for many people those are the same thing) into trying alternatives. And that’s okay - it’s going to have to be, because it’s not going to change. And if it did, then that type of person would be all up in your federated network.
Personally, if 25 million normies joined microblogging fedi, I’d probably leave. I like microblogging fedi small & weird. The vibe on Bluesky is rancid as fuck and that’s where a lot of the normies went when Twitter got rebranded as a Nazi bar. Anyway, microblogging fedi is thriving based on the metric I care about, namely interesting conversations and interesting stuff to look at and people engaging with my project accounts.
But if you want to talk the whys and wherefores - the Mastodon “dev process” is the single biggest impediment to Mastodon being, you know, good. And that’s a direct outgrowth of the mentality of the people who run it. Could I elaborate? Maybe. But (regardless of what my account info says) I’ve been on fedi more than 10 years, and I’ll just say, you’ll have to look into that yourself. Mastodon is not good software, and it’s not going to become good software. And many if not most of the other microblogging fedi platform apps are just not trying to have mass appeal. It’s not a goal of those projects. If you want it to be, you’ll probably have to fork one or build one from scratch.
I hear there are similar issues with Lemmy and with Piefed. Personally, I’m posting from a Lemmy account, but I’ll be taking a much closer look at Piefed when I get my shit together to set up my own node. I don’t know if Piefed is trying for mass appeal or not, but even if the devs are, the federated nature of the threadiverse is by definition going to make it conceptually a bit harder to engage with, because there is necessarily going to be 15 communities for every topic, and that’s by design and working as intended. Federated social media was never going to be as “easy” to use as centralized megacorp social media, and will never be, and that’s by design, and that’s okay. It’s going to have to be, or you’ll need to switch to a centralized model.
I would argue that the lack of vision and the insular development culture of Mastodon combined with it claiming most of the users in microblogging fedi has done more to stunt ActivityPub than any other factor.