

It is social media that allows privacy and stops Corps selling your data is its USP.
If the person you are talking to does not care about the above, they have no reason to move.
Seems like the Fediverse’ existence is trying to to send a message at the end of the day. If I were telling somebody about it and stopped as soon as they said the good old “I have nothing to hide” it would be kind of pointless to begin with. Might as well give the whole spill since that phrase likely is to be a given anyway.
The problem is that in all other aspects of social media: ease of use, userbase etc the various flavours of federated social media are last.
I do agree, they are behind the centralized social media. However, I don’t think it would help federated social media’s case if we didn’t at least try to simplify it somewhat and show the appeal.
Personally, I am a bit sceptical about the long term sustainability and scalability of data storage for data intensive (images and video) federated services.
For images, I suspect that something like this would only be a major issue for federated platforms (besides Pixelfed) in the case of a massive influx of users from another platform all at once. Otherwise, the infrastructure would likely catch up eventually. Kbin, for instance, eventually scaled despite at one point being run by a single person on software absolutely not meant for that many people. Video, on the other hand, I do also feel skeptical about on the Fediverse unless a massive organization were to host an instance.
I always love to see attempts to see people making the Fediverse more friendly and open for all, but I can’t see this one working.
I’m not really a huge fan of the name Mastodon personally, but I don’t have any other better ideas. The branding right now works, there just isn’t enough people actually hearing about what Mastodon is to begin with. We need to push Mastodon, the name that people may have heard of before but never bothered to look into. Changing it now won’t really do a whole lot. If they wanted to get the name out there, I feel this could be done through other ways like a massive update or something.