Mildly Infuriating

You say that like that's actually true.

The real reason that people go to bluesky over Mastodon has nothing to do with "The System™", it's because the Mastodon onboarding process is incomprehendibly awful. It's far worse than Lemmy, which itself is pretty terrible. The refusal to introduce an algorithm isn't pro-consumer it's just hostile to the non-terminally online. If a service isn't easy to use it won't be used. This isn't a revolutionary concept.

Every cycle of enshittification sends more people looking for alternatives. Remember the rebirth of "piracy" which streaming had all but killed for the most normal normies? People crave the system, but it's possible they'll slowly come around. Will it be fast enough. That's for us to find out. I gently encourage people to think about more than just tomorrow because that short term proprietary bullcrap isn't worth it in the long term. Definitely hear you though and it does feel that uphill sometimes.

People don't crave the system, they rather come to places that are advertised to them.

What they crave is:

• Easy onboarding without figuring out what is an "instance" (a concept entirely unknown to them), and which instances are good vs bad for them;
• A trusted place that won't become unavailable or buggy because an admin is performing an update or screwed something up or decided they don't want to do this anymore;
• Some sort of algorithm to filter out crap out of their feed (not having any algorithm is often not good);
• Having their favorite creators and friends on the platform (which, again, boils out to advertising for a large part);

etc.

Fediverse as a whole and Mastodon in particular is yet to answer to a lot of these challenges.

It already happens