For social media an important point is inertia/network effects combined with marketing. And I think a lot of open source/decentralised advocates are not good at marketing, while at the same time network effects can't kick in due to lack of content. Because ultimately most people don't care about it being open source or decentralised, most people care about content. If your favourite youtuber is not on peertube, then why use peertube. If your favourite celebrity is not on mastodon/pixelfed/loops then why use those. If there is no community for your favourite sportsball team on lemmy/piefed why join those platforms?

Onboarding is a nightmare

Advice is always "first make a series of crucial yet obtuse choices based on vibes" and then immediately pivots to "get good"

New platforms, launchers, apps, etc are hailed as perfect alts one day and decried as abandoned buggy corpo trash 3 days later

Open source does not have billions of dollars to spend on marketing.

We can work together to polish apps/software and use word of mouth. This will help to grow these other options.

Explosive growth is driven by large dollar amounts. Think LinkedIn being included as a shortcut in Windows, or every phone coming with Facefuck pre installed.

Until we can get people away from platforms owned by major corporations we will not be able to shrug off the programs they push on people.

Getting individuals to switch to something not commercial isn't that hard, in my experience or opinion except in the case of instant messenger or other communication apps. The main point of contention with chat, or SM, is they are not there for the service. They are there because the people they know are there.

Unless you can get the majority of people switching at once, it's gonna be really hard to get an individual, or even a handful to move.

One answer: People love their defaults. Computers come pre installed with Windows, MacOS, (Bad) Android. Creative professionals are trained on Adobe Suite. Business professionals are trained and certified for MS Office and SaaS ERP Software. They don’t look beyond the defaults because their goal is not to determine which software/tool gives the most value or teaches them the most but which software/tool is the default that will give them a job and unfortunately FOSS is not the default for 90% of those people.

People have been made used to closed gardens. Some people can’t comprehend that open gardens and free choice exists.

(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.

A lot of people don't care and are just looking for their instant gratification.

They also don't want to entertain the idea that they may have been doing things wrong all this time.

A lot of great comments, but another one that's not mentioned: money and advertising

Open source / non profit run websites don't have money to burn on mobile ads, and many wouldn't want to put money into the ad industry even if they did.

It doesn't guarantee users, plenty of startups fail after promotional campaigns, but it definitely helps people learn about the platform

Well, often they are just not as good and active. Most people care about content and service more than principles.

Its not as convinient, and you can't blame anyone but yourself when it breaks.

I'm going with "it's not actually harder to promote decentralized options". But they tend not to have marketing teams.

If one were to assemble an active professional marketing team for a decentralized tool, the team would be similarly effective as they would be for a centralized tool.

Because marketing department haven't been open sourced yet

Microsoft, Apple, etc spend billions on marketing, whereas open source spends about 0. It relies wholly on word of mouth advertisements, and just showing people that it's actually better and free

Believe you me, if tomorrow we get world wide advertising for a free operating system that works better than Window crap or apple crap, that won't spy, and is free, a LOT more people will jump in.

I'm guessing that "open source" either is completely u known or still is a bit of a dirty word for people, associated with "alternative software" so it must be worse than the "real" software, right?

Even though in many MANY ways its superior to corporate software. And its free. And its almost always free as well.

I'm guessing that the cloud services has also been a response from tech companies to open source because on the one hand they get to use open source software for free without giving back anything and on the other hand they get to sell subscription services for stuff that should be free anyways.

Again, most SaaS software providers put there float on open source software, yet they'll charge you through the nose for the little layer they built on top of that. There are other such layers available for free in the open source community,but you'll have to set it up yourself. That is the basic difference.

For me, o host everything myself.

Social media only matters if there’s people there. How can you convince someone of jumping ship to an empty place?

I think that it would be easier for them to give up social media completely than to move somewhere else without people.

The only way would be to have something there that they need or want and then tell them to make an account in a specific place, no choosing instances bullshit, they'll figure it out eventually if they're interested.

Familiarity.

It was a pain in the ass for me to even try to get people I knew to even try Discord, if they weren't already on it. They just love their Facebook too much to even take a moment to poke their head out and see the alternatives.

I was watching a livestream the other day by someone who appears intelligent and knowledgeable enough to know that she should probably give up Windows and use Linux instead. So far as I could tell there isn't really any reason why she shouldn't. It was the kind of stream where she had plenty of time to just talk freely about whatever was on her mind, and usually that's nothing to do with computers or their operating systems. But she was thinking of doing it. She worries about this and that. She wonders if OBS will work as well, she imagines it would be a lot of work, she seems unsure that her tech skills would be good enough, she worries that it might go wrong, that it might not be worth it, that she might pick the wrong distro, that her webcam wouldn't work, that it might be a colossal waste of time for very little benefit.

People unaccustomed to software freedom find it hard to understand how it would benefit them. People are afraid of change.

UX sucks. Accessibility is nonexistent.

People do not care about decentralization and privacy that is the harsh reality. The best way to promote privacy is to not talk about privacy and provide concrete advantages and unique feature.

Most people moved to Cara not pixelfed. Most people moved to upscrolled not loops.

Also the marketing is terrible. The fediverse creators should go to tech podcast, contact tech medias, participating to general tech events etc

Change is hard for most people. When much of the world runs on Android/Google and Mac/iPhone its hard to convince people to switch. Hell, it's hard to switch when you actually do want to leave because the infrastructure is so proprietary and locked in. I'm in the process of de-googling my phone but i use Google applications for work, so its been difficult. Not impossible, but very difficult.

For social media: Aside from the reason that everyone they know is on the popular ones, it's also because of the algorithms. People are too lazy to curate their feed, and algorithms tickle the part of our brains that light up and keep us engaged.

Bringing more people would ruin these platforms just as they ruined the other platforms.

Was it ever easy?

People who value things like open source are more likely to be curious people who enjoy understanding something

often such projects require active engagement and self education they also reward people look deeply into something

Look at things like Facebook everything is designed to lead you to an endpoint you are not ever allowed to understand how the machine works they reward people who shallowly engage often at a base less

It's not mere complacency these platforms are designed for different people the people who enjoy one platform don't typically enjoy the other because it's not one specific thing about the product they enjoy or don't enjoy it's all the systems that form the big machine that they enjoy

In addition to the points the other posts have made, I think we've been conditioned to believe that cost = quality, "you get what you pay for."

Edited to add: I thought the question was about FOSS/Open Source in general. I guess it was more specific than I realized.

Marketing budgets

It's always contents. Being open source or decentralised is never the sole reason that convinces someone to use them. Same reason why people avoid hexbear even though it's open source, or Truth social even though it's based on Mastodon (I know they're not open source anymore nor decentralised but you get the idea).