Most people aren’t even thinking of moving to reddit alternatives. Users have a lot of power in this situation. Just move your community to Lemmy or Kbin. It’s not that hard.
Im not sure how much I want people to leave reddit. There was a lot of garbage users and bots and such. Even if all actual individuals left reddit the corpo, bot, other things from some organization elements I bet would be a fairly large populace.
I would prefer if only those who wants to leave reddit left. That this would be an option only for those who are prepared to migrate, and not the redditor who likes their new UI and their official app. I think this place might be the wrong place for them. At this point Lemmy gives me the feeling of a web forum, which in all fairness is pretty cool tech wise (I really like the federated part) but also more or less just a web forum. I can’t imagine what kind of negative experience the average redditor would have here…
“It doesn’t look like reddit” “What are communities?” “Where are all the people?” Etcetera.
Which is fair, I think Fediverse has a bit of growing to do still. That being said, I can live without that kind of content here, and I’d rather have more quality over quantity here. That’s just me though, I’m looking forward to seeing where this place ends up.
The communities I browse are either small (behavioral science/school) or full of elders who aren’t interested with switching platforms. So that’s a pretty big reason. Some of them have organizations that still have large presences on things like fb. Not having an account hamstrings a persons ability to stay current with professional topics…not great for a lot of fields. Now, this is just my particular instance. But I’ve heard a lot of the same from colleagues and adjacent professions. As for me, my account is deleted and I don’t contribute content meaningfully anymore. Which I suspect is another major downside to all of this, brain drain.
It’s similar to playing MMORPGs and then switching to another game. You create an account with a lot of karma that people are proud of, you acquire those avatars and milestones, and you make friends. Then you start in a new place which is not user-friendly as the old one, and you lose everything from your previous account.
Many others, of course, are like me and do not care, but I believe the majority of people do.
Because it still lacks content, is pretty unpolished, and the nature of fedi makes it complicated for a lot of people. That’s a lot of barriers, so it’s going to be a slow growth from here while these issues get worked on.
Most people just want things to work, and once they’ve become accustomed to a platform, they’re reluctant to learn a new one. Especially if it’s just getting off the ground. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if a lot of the early adopters here have gone through this before and know that things will get better (in terms of functionality as well as content) as time goes on.