I don't know. People want to be in "the place" and they want to be where the other people are and AOC isn't joining Mastodon and Barack Obama isn't joining Mastodon and my ex-wife just found out that Mastodon exists at all like...yesterday? Because I told her?

You are comparing a place that is basically a single user experience, where the tech and the user experience itself, the entirety of "The Bluesky experience" is created by a small, tight, and apparently very well-paid team of technical experts. They have literally millions of dollars at their disposal.

Meanwhile, over here we have the dinky little DIY nerd internet, where people write code for free and host the infrastructure for fun and have ZERO millions of dollars and most of us are getting paid almost nothing, and there's no single shared software, much less anything you could truly call a single contiguous place even as we refer to this as "the fediverse" or "this place" or "on here" it's really not, it's truly decentralized, and my slice of the fedi looks different than yours because we follow different people.

There's no well-paid onboarding team or user experience team or fuck, there's not even a "design team" because that would imply a centralized staff (ie., bluesky or X or Meta developers).

There's people making software so people can host their own social media. Many are almost doing this work for free. They have no large investment capital, and often are doing this in addition to their real day job, for the love of it, because they believe in a mission of social media anyone can use and host, and a space that truly isn't owned by anyone, which no one can shut down.

And this little DIY nerd vehicle, "this place" it still gains more users, every month, little by little. Sometimes an ebb, sometimes a flow, but this is without a marketing department, without an MBA, without VC funding, honestly, largely without capitalism.

It's a miracle, and I think we should be realistic about what we should expect.

Not seeing "the big numbers" doesn't really mean anything to me. We were never going to compete with the "new place" and the "one experience" and if you've ever used an iPhone you'll understand the advantages of centralization, and controlling an entire technical ecosystem, and how onboarding and UX is utilized to make adoption easier.

Also, how easily you can use millions of dollars of investment to look like a 'serious bet' to the rest of the world, or get your name in the media, and to drive recognition and adoption.

What the fedi can do better than just about anything else is be affordable self-hosted ownerless ad-free social media in perpetuity. That will always have an appeal and it will still be here, waiting, when the other platforms (from which we can steal all their good ideas while jettisoning all the predatory bad ones) have enshittified or changed ownership to baby Hitler.