My spouse still uses X heavily. They don't like Elon Musk either, but they check in on the fediverse occasionally and always come back saying the same thing: it feels like a space only for software engineers.
They're right, and I don't have a good answer for it.
You can say it's network effects, and that's part of it. But that still doesn't explain why the place feels closed off even when people do try it. X has an algorithm that surfaces content from people you don't follow, so even if you open it at random, there's always some shared background chatter: memes, game reactions, celebrity nonsense, whatever people are mad about that day. The fediverse has none of that. You see what the people you've deliberately followed have posted. So when non-technical people do show up, they often land in silence. And a lot of what they do see is fediverse talk, Linux talk, ActivityPub talk. Which is fine for me—I spend most of my waking hours thinking about ActivityPub—but I can see why it would feel alienating to someone who just wants to talk about films or cooking or K-dramas.
Then I look at Japan and think maybe this isn't impossible after all. Misskey and its forks developed a culture that pulled in illustrators, anime fans, people who had no interest in self-hosting or federation protocols. The reactions help. Some instances feel playful instead of dutiful. That seems to matter. I'm not sure exactly what made that work, or whether anyone could build that on purpose.
This feels especially hard in Korean. The pool is smaller, and communities like K-pop fandoms or webtoon readers have so much gravity on X that there's no obvious reason for them to leave. And even if some of them did, discovery is broken enough that they might not find each other in time—enough people that the place stops feeling empty.
When my spouse says the fediverse feels like it's for software engineers, I mostly just sit there, because I don't know how to tell them they're wrong.
