Probably a lot of the problem causing people to remain stubbornly on instances like mastodon.social & the other big ones that federate with threads & shit is some kind of inability to understand the concepts of horizontalism and federation themselves. People want the fediverse to be a "replacement" for corporate internet with someone at the "top" who just takes care of shit for them without them having to really be involved in building the experience and even the infrastructure themselves.
And I get it. I am not a tech person. My literal job for over a decade has been very rope-and-hammers, working with "tech" that's essentially over three centuries old. Everything I have taught myself about Linux, for instance, has been at the cost of a LOT of my personal time & frustration. So I do think that part of it is that folks who do know the tech and do build the infrastructure have become accustomed to being a sort of hidden or even ignored minority (numerically) compared to tech users. And that's real. And I do think that this requires a shifting of everyone's understanding of their roles in these projects.
But as a tech user, I am trying to recognize my responsibility towards learning more about how these technologies work, if I want to keep using them. I also want to call on the technologically-minded to recognize their responsibilities to teach and make knowledge accessible. This isn't unique to the high-tech world. Going forward, we all need to recognize our interdependence on a greater level, and change how we view the systems that we rely on. We can decide NOT to rely on some of them, for sure, but no decision we make about that is truly made in a vacuum. If we want things like the fediverse (or the internet in general) to continue, we need to understand that it can only be a cooperative endeavor.
Like I said, this goes for everything. Water. Transportation. Food. Shelter. But in the case of tech, we all have further to go to break out of the user/provider binary. At least to the point of understanding that if we want anything like a "free" and federated internet, we can't just ignore movements like the #fedipact as not being applicable to us. If you want a twitter experience, go to twitter. If you want a facebook experience, stay on facebook. Don't bring that shit into a project where we're all trying to learn how to break out of corporate control. This learning may not be easy for most, but it's necessary and if you're already here on the fediverse I don't think I need to explain why.
