This is not going to be a blogpost about “Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?”. I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven’t even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.
Just because they know the Fediverse, doesn’t mean they know Lemmy.
For more than 50% of all Mastodon users (that’s more than 25% of all Fediverse users), the Fediverse equals Mastodon. For large parts of the rest, if it doesn’t behave like Mastodon, it’s disturbing.
Besides, how are they supposed to learn about Lemmy anyway? Yes, in theory, Mastodon and Lemmy are federated. In theory.
In fact, however, they’re almost completely incompatible. Lemmy is all about groups. It doesn’t support any interaction between users directly. Mastodon, on the other hand, is about users interacting with each other directly. It has no support for groups whatsoever. At all. Nada. Zilch.
One of many reasons why there’s almost no interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy that’d demonstrate to Mastodon users that Lemmy exists by confronting them with Lemmy content.
By the way, the latter won’t work anyway. Mastodon doesn’t show you what software a message came from. Thus, most Mastodon users assume that everything they see comes from Mastodon.