Well, I'd say marketing issues have an effect here too. Lots of 'alternatives' don't really understand that average Joe doesn't specifically care about decentra

Well, I'd say marketing issues have an effect here too. Lots of 'alternatives' don't really understand that average Joe doesn't specifically care about decentralisation (or privacy/censorship resistance/whatever else they're marketing the product on). They don't hate said things, they just don't care about them as much as finding interesting people to follow/groups to be a part of, joining in an active community, finding information about things they're having trouble with, being entertained, etc. But most decentralised systems seem to be marketed on the assumption the decentralisation side (and the philosophical aims of the service) are the only important thing, and hence don't really appeal to those outside of the tech crowd and those with a desparate need for avoiding censorship. Secondly, the UI is often worse than the centralised or commercial alternatives, with very few systems (Mastodon arguably being of the exceptions) looking or feeling as modern or responsive. Finally, plain old network effects have an effect too. The more people who use your service, the more popular it'll become, since more people they know will be encouraged to join in. But to achieve that, you usually need to put time and money into marketing your product and attracting as many early users as you can. That's hard work, and it's not fun for a developer. What is fun for a developer is to play around with programming languages and data structures and protocols and frameworks and all the new shiny stuff they saw on Hacker News. So all the effort goes towards making a technically fancy system, whereas none of it goes towards actually getting people to use said system, or getting the word out in general. Get away from the code editor and get into community building. (Though to be fair, that last one is also a problem with most new social networking sites in general, decentralised or not. Every modern Reddit or Twitter alternative feels like a programmer's fun pet project rather than a service they're marketing to people) Either way, I think that covers it. The lack of certain features like trending content doesn't matter as much as how these systems don't market themselves correctly and put little work into the things people actually care about.