This will always be a problem with federated vs unfederated services. It's hard to get a network effect when things are so spread out without a central place.
You don't need a central place, but you do need places that are large enough, mainstream enough, and trusted enough, for the masses. Email is like this now.
If people wanted email 2.0 they wouldn't have flocked to social media 1.0 and begun doing most of their correspondence through messaging instead of email.
but that's not how you use email. you don't sign up for an email account, and then go searching for other users to follow and what not with in the same server.
with social platforms, you do just that. you want to see a centralized list of available users to choose to follow or subscribe or join cult or whatever.
i'm deliberately using centralized here as not needing to know that multiple servers exist with different users in each. maybe i'm showing my ignorance of mastodon, but it seems like mastodon.com or whatever central website could just publish a list that mastodon clients can refer to rather than making users discovery a hunt and fetch kind of process. like a torrent index site. if that already exists, then i'll TIL the workings of mastodon. if it doesn't exists, then it seems very short sited.
