Technology

This is literally what I'm talking about. You say that and then wonder why Mastodon doesn't catch on, yet every other successful social media does this. It's already evident that people don't want this by the huge numbers dropping off mastodon.

I never felt it was too complicated, though the people unfamiliar with decentralization definitely get confused by the process of on boarding. The lack of content is still the issue for a lot of reasons. Mastodon's search is straight up broken. Also it doesn't show federations of users you're following, it can definitely extend it's social graph a lot more. They intentionally nerf it for dumb reasons thinking it somehow marginalizes people, it makes no sense.

Lemmy does do this and is why it feels a lot more exciting on Lemmy. It's also why I pretty much abandoned Mastodon since most of my time is on Lemmy at this point.

You got to follow a bunch of people before it starts to feel worthwhile, see if anybody you know from outside of Mastodon has a profile there, or open up different instances and check out people there.

If you want you can even follow people and Communities (though on Mastodon they're called groups) from Lemmy and reply to them from Mastodon (it is a little bit clunky).

Though for best results you should try and follow people on Mastodon or similar federated microblogging platforms, since people who they follow also have a chance of showing up in your feed.

I feel it is a bit of a reality check in that most people actually just post mundane stuff, while certain other sites purposely promote all the rage bait and controversial topics instead, which somewhat distorts your potential world view.