Why is everyone still on Reddit when they could be on the Fediverse?

This may be something you don't want to hear so please bear with me. I've been here since the reddit drama started.
There isn't much engagement here. If you compare a post here to a post on reddit, there will be zero comments here and 100 to 1000+ on reddit.
Another issue is each instance has its own version of the same community. This isn't a bad thing but it separates the comments and increases the reposts. If I'm scrolling all, sometimes I see 5+ of the same post with zero comments on each.
Another problem, it's not inherently easy to sign up. There are hundreds if not thousands of instances. If the instance you pick shuts down or goes down for a bit, well... you're SOL. I've lost two accounts on two instances that shut down.
Another problem, since it's not mainstream, there's not much content in niche communities. A lot of the niche communities that start up post a lot of bot content which no one engages with and then the community dies.
I still advocate moving over but there is a lot of work to be done to get the masses moved over.
- One PC community, which I’m pretty sure died because I haven’t noticed any content from it in a few months, was using a bot to copy posts from Reddit but it made no sense because 50% of the posts were asking for tech support. Every post had 0 replies because, obviously, who would waste time replying when the OP who needed answers was on a different platform entirely.
  
  Sometimes those responses are useful to others searching for the same issue. Future me thanks you for responding so I don’t have to browse Reddit for the solution.
- This. Actually launching a community is hard. Launching a decentralized network of communities is damn hard.
  I've been around for long enough to remember the internet before megasites like Reddit, when every community had their own forums and/or website. Specific mod for a specific game? Unique forum. Specific sub-community of a fandom, like a bunch of tech nerds analyzing the starships in Star Wars? Unique forum.
  And like, I don't deny that losing that hurt. Each site had its own unique little flavor of community, and the great centralization of the internet definitely steamrolled that flat in favor of mainstream appeal. But centralizing did also improve ease of discovery and access. Now we're trying to build all of those little communities back in what - 2-3 years? In comparison to the 10+ they had to grow in before? It's not going to be easy.
- Also, the lack of moderation means communities are just sort of whatever the hell people who are currently posting want them to be. Serious abuse usually gets handled eventually, but posts and comments are frequently off-topic. Lots of communities don't even have rules.
- Idk if this has been a thing or not but why isn’t there a way to “merge” viewing of communities with similar content? Like why can’t I just say show me all posts with the community named “asklemmy” and show all posts regardless of the instance it’s on as long as it’s federated with your instance. If that is a thing, why is that not extremely obvious and easy to do and arguably not just the default behavior when looking for communities? Different instances will probably have different rules but the content will probably be similar and relevant.
- There aren't much niche topics here, sure. But the fewer engagement makes your engagement more valuable. On reddit I felt that all my comments went unheard unless I browsed new. It was actually a bit stressful to make my comments not be completely useless. On lemmy you're more likely to be heard and to emgage in actual conversation or discussion with an actual person.
- ...also the toxic out of control leftists
- The sad part is that all these issues have been known for a while now and none if them have been tackled at all so far.
  How amazing would it be if you could just link your account with any instance at any time? My instance is down? No worries, I connect using another.
  What if that community you are interested in doesn't have its' users split on 4 different instances making it even more niche than before?
  What if when I create an account I get a list of suggested instances and a mini description so I don't have to immediately know what I'm doing and learn about this later? With proper account migration I could change this anytime I want.
  On top of all of that I keep hearing the mod tools are atrocious.
  When was the last time a major feature was added to lemmy? I think the only hope now is a different competitor on ActivityPub like piefed.

Network effects, mostly.
- Although things are getting better over time. I remember when Lemmy was empty. Now there.s like 3 actively developed servers and tons of instances and actual activity. I haven't felt the need to go back to reddit except for a vague longing for the more niche communities I'm theoretically missing out on. But for news and tech? Who needs reddit anymore

The fediverse requires more effort.

Habits are hard to break.
I'm predominantly here because my habit was tied to a 3rd party app that stopped working with the API changes.
I'm still here because it's good, but it was the habit being broken that pushed me here in the first place.
- I had a pretty bad reddit habit. Sometimes would do the thing of quitting the app and opening it back up quickly after.
  I was using boost and it worked for a long time after it was supposed to stop working. The day it actually stopped working I went over to Lemmy.
  Reddit is pretty bad with the propaganda, bots, censorship and what not. It was definitely getting worse before I left and isn't any better.
  I have the official reddit app installed because sometimes reddit will have something I need and using the web browser on my phone is somehow worse than their shitty app.
  I wish there was more engagement on Lemmy. I understand all the reasons it's difficult to grow though and honestly there's a lot of quality conversations going on
- I quit cold turkey by dns blocking Reddit everywhere and deleting narwhal. I don't know how people can quit in any other way. Apps like Reddit are designed to be addictive, so it's no surprise that people have a hard time giving them up.
  
  like many on reddit, most of us was forced out either due to site-wide banning on all accounts they have been doing. or the sudden shadowbannings they have been doing alot lately. i do checkup on the shadowbanning subreddit , to see how aggressive they are banning people.

Not enough niche communities. Like, not even close. Example: there are communities for general Android or general gaming, but not one for Android gaming or mobile gaming.
Harder than Reddit to sign up. There's an extra step which is instances. So first you gotta understand what instances are, how they work, and which one is suitable for you.
Reddit is still doing fine, or at least not bad enough for the masses to care about jumping over to Lemmy
- Not enough niche communities
  Not even just niche communities, either. There are interests with possibly hundreds of millions of English speakers that don't have good representation on Lemmy (or piefed or Mbin). There's no critical mass of discussion about sports, much less for specific sports, specific leagues, or specific teams. Same issue with food and cooking, a handful of posts on a handful of communities, but very few discussions. Television and film have seen an uptick in activity (I'm subscribed to television@piefed.social and that's been getting better), but it's still not quite at where reddit was in even 2010 or so.
  Local city subreddits are still a valuable source of information and discussion around what's happening in any particular place, and I haven't seen anything like that on lemmy.
  I don't expect Lemmy to have the same level of discussion around smaller niches, but I hope we can soon hit the point where more mainstream topics can get actual discussion. Lemmy has plenty of great discussion around lots of topics, especially around technology, but it's still got a long way to go.

They don't know about it.
They are lazy and or incompetent (so many times I've seen people saying they can't figure Lemmy out when it's literally the same as Reddit on the surface. Just make an account somewhere and start using it.)
They are bots.
- 50% of reddit is bots.
- Incompetent? Really?
- “Just make an account somewhere” is where things go wrong for most people, they want a guided hand or else they’ll stay were they are.

Lack of diversity, imo.
If you’re (edit)NOT(/edit) into Star Trek, Linux, coding, or politics there’s not that much content. Which isn’t gonna attract too many new people, and is probably alienating to many of the new users checking out the fediverse.
I hate the ads & the Reddit app, but Lemmy feels like more of an echo chamber than Reddit does.

Not going to lie, I prefer it that way. There's just enough people here that it's engaging, but not too many that it will turn into a cesspool like reddit did. Let's just let it attract the right users naturally for as long as possible. We don't need to mass market it and bring every reddit user over.
- Exactly, it's the goldilocks phase right now for lemmy, to be followed by endless ululations for eternal September. This is the shit y'all be nostalgic for soon.
- A lot of Reddit is LLMs talking to each other now. One very obvious example of this is /r/stories. Nearly every one of them has the hallmarks of AI generation. As you read through the hundreds of comments, many look like AI as well. I’ve been noticing more of it in other subs too. Dead internet theory is coming true.

Why are you asking us, instead of them?

Because there is no content here.
Every time I have a question about a TV show I'm watching, its always Reddit that have a discussion thread, never Lemmy.
- Why don't you start a thread ?
  
  For the latest anime episode discussion where do I go? On https://lemmy.world/c/anime? Or lemmy.ml/c/anime? Or https://ani.social/c/anime? https://lemmit.online/c/anime? https://jlai.lu/c/anime? https://adultswim.fan/c/anime? https://lemmy.eco.br/c/anime? https://sopuli.xyz/c/anime? https://feddit.nl/c/anime?
  Now we need an army of mods for every community instead of a few for just the one. IMO lemmy will never scale in this state.

I'm not. But it's probably the same reason as WhatsApp in Europe. Why be on WhatsApp when you can be on signal (or whatever). The answer is: that's where the people are. The fediverse is amazing. And I've totally switched over and don't use reddit anymore. But it has but a tiny fraction of the users compared to reddit.
For example. /r/TipOfMyJoystick has multiple posts daily. !TipOfMyJoystick@retrolemmy.com hasn't had activity in months. It's the nature of a smaller user base.
- Also WhatsApp is from 2009, Signal 2015 (but gained popularity later) as Reddit is from 2005 and the fediverse became "popular" in small niches after the mods exodus a couple of years ago

More content.
Do your part people, post and/or engage.

I'm guessing its because there is a ton of people already there creating content. Its almost impossible for 50k users to produce as wide of a range of content compared to a platform of 100M but i think we do ok here.

I have a coworker who recently excitedly explained how Reddit works to someone who'd never heard of it. Never mind that all the features he was raving about are here on Lemmy without the bots, Nazis, karma farming, corporate enshittification; he's seen as the tech savvy person in the building.
Here I am with a 13+ year old Reddit account, nuked, and quit after the API debacle and have never returned. Just sipping my tea and enjoying my Community feed. There's just some things people have to figure out on their own.

The fediverse lacks basically all of my niche communities and the ones that exist have zero engagement. I'm basically only on Lemmy at this point for political stuff. Politics anything is a shitshow on Reddit, but seems decent on Lemmy. But that's just really not enough.
Though to be fair, Reddit's 'suggested' posts feature is I believe destroying niche communities on Reddit these days, so I'm not sure how much longer those will keep working for me either. Moving away from explicit subscriptions and turning your home feed into just a lesser version of /r/all is a good way to ruin most communities over time I think. I feel eventually Reddit will just become Facebook for millennials where your feed is completely divorced from anything you might actually want to see and is entirely an algorithm instead.
- niche, like people are visitng celebrety specific instance, youtube channels specific reddits too.

I haven’t been on Reddit in two years now.

Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.

I mean i would have never came here if i didn't get banned from reddit,not because reddit is better but because it is what everyone uses and is considered the norm.
I didn't even know Lemmy existed.
- Same boat as me

bit of a paradox. weak specific instances but the only way it will go up is to get more people

reddit is more addicting, and has more communities not found in the fediverse. and likely most cant be replicated easily here. many like some specific niche forums, like school, degrees, specific diseases where peopel share thier experiences and treatment plans ,,,etc/. whatisthisthing, or reddit drama,etc.
even politics/news dont get as much engagement as on reddit, even if you exclude bots/astroturfers.

Why is everyone still on Xitter when they could be bloomscrolling with kind, elderly trekkies on Mastodon instead?
- the grifters are keeping engage, that includes resistance grifters which are the mirror equivalent of right wing grifters.

We are here.

I'm here, so keep that in mind, but as far as I'm concerned and objectively speaking, Lemmy does not offer what most casual users / general public want nor does it really operate the way people expect. Whether or not that's a good thing or bad thing or something in between is more subjective, so I'll leave it at that.
For example, if I want to scrap my account and start new, fine. But with Lemmy, it's been forced on me at least 4 times, and several other times I have done it because the instance I was on was unstable, had unacceptable technical issues, or just too much outage. Reddit definitely has outages and other issues like that, but those are generally addressed in minutes to hours, not days/weeks/months.
I've long given up on finding a place here for my main hobbies. There are communities, but I don't enjoy talking to nobody, posting to myself. If I wanted to do that, I'd just get a Twitter account and tweet into the wind. So, honestly, I can see the appeal of going to Reddit so you can actually discuss things and share with other people.
Those are just two examples of things that might keep the average person away. Of course, there are plenty of issues and concerns with Reddit and other social media platforms, but as long as they continue to work in a manner that people understand and expect and offer what folks want, most people aren't going to go seeking out alternatives that have many more downsides, relatively speaking.

I am loving Lemmy, but it does have a bit of a steep learning curve, also Reddit has such huge “market share”.
Also I am loving Lemmy because I was perma banned from Reddit. If I had not been banned I would not have bothered with Lemmy.
- I only got banned for 7 days and I said go fuck yourselves reddit. I was already trying to get off of it along with all socials, but I still feel the need to talk with strangers online so here I am on Lemmy. And yes, there is a learning curve with Lemmy.

I scuttled my own account on reddit by intentionally getting banned. That way I had no option to return.
- shadowbanning is the best way, much harder to evade than a sitewide ban, just use a vpn and they will ban you eventually

Most probably don't know about it yet.
Enjoy that while it lasts.
- I think that there's good to be had at all stages, be it more community feel and less spam and advertising and such when small or more options and content and higher-profile people when large.
  But in the vein of your comment:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.[1][2] Prior to this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.
  The flood of new and generally inexperienced Internet users directed to Usenet by commercial ISPs in 1993 and subsequent years swamped the existing culture of those forums and their ability to self-moderate and enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users.[3] Hence, from the early Usenet community point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless.
- They know, but don't see the value in the effort.

The same reason most people are still on Facebook and Instagram I suppose. It's what they know.

If everyone from Reddit just went over to lemmy.world and sh.it.just.works instead of making accounts all over the fediverse and maybe even hosting their own instance, then we’d just have the same problems that we did with Reddit, just at a different domain.
The fediverse will grow in due time. But thinking of it in terms of supplanting Reddit, or replacing twitter isn’t a good mindset. Decentralized social media and activitypub are tools to build better experiences, not replace the enshittified entrenched ones.

I still go back to Reddit for answers because even when you have to search through often contradictory comments, it's better than Google's AI slop and sponsored results.
And is Lemmy searchable yet? That's a huge factor. People can search for old Reddit posts, but it's nigh impossible to find something specific on Lemmy unless you know what community it's in.

When you say everyone, actually you don't mean everyone, so your post really doesn't mean much, now does it.

I’d rather they didn’t. Normies flooding Reddit is what lead to its enshitification
- Well, that's not true, is it?
  Sure, enshittification comes after acquiring a large userbase, but it's not the users that enshittify the platform. It's about profit.
  Not necessarily sayings that's not gonna happen over here, just that I don't agree with your framing.
  
  r/holup and r/whitepersontwitter
  Those are demonstrations.

Not on reddit any longer, but I've got weird problems here. Suddenly I can no longer edit my own posts, not even in another browser, and as of today I can not longer save posts. For whatever reason, lemmy.nsfw no longer loads pics. No idea WTF is going on, but odd technical issues will turn away the masses. I'm fine with that.

They like getting data farmed . Seriously though, Reddit became what Digg was after going public. It attracted a lot of people who don't know the old Reddit and so they don't know how the mods are strangling it.
One day enough of them will get banned and end up here- shifting the network scale.