I’ll just paste here what I wrote elsewhere:

• The average person is tech illiterate, so having them understand what a “federated platform” is, is too much to ask. It may be easy for you or me, but we’re here on Lemmy, so that immediately makes us not the average.

• The average person also doesn’t care what a federated platform is. They just want something that is convenient and works. Same as the above point; maybe we would be willing to sit down and figure things out, but others will consider that a waste of time and bad.

• In that sense, federated platforms are a major failure, as picking instances and creating accounts is a hassle rather than a convenience.

• From personal experience, trying to find a Mastodon instance to make an account on was irritating. Some rules were too restrictive, some rules were too vague, other rules looked like they were created for sensitive little snowflakes. It was like reading through the rules of Discord servers. Not a good look for a social media platform.

• Something like Bluesky tries to be both; a platform without algorithms (or only user-created algorithms that you can choose to subscribe to), where you can make your own instance or just be part of its centralised instance. The fact that the overwhelming number of people choose the latter should tell you enough about what people want.