The Fediverse has a much smaller reach than mainstream social networks. Your target audience might not be on it.
More seriously, there’s nothing in particular that requires complete centralisation for success, though a future billion person ActivityPub network probably relies mostly on a few giant hosts (a la gmail) rather than millions of small ones.
The lesson we should have learned about alternative platforms is that they will attract power users and enthusiasts. These people will be very vocal about why everyone will switch to the next big whatever. A lot of enthusiasts and power users will switch, and a big flood of people comes over to the alternative platform like the tide coming in.
But normal users don't really give a crap about Twitter politics. The people who don't think about Twitter as a community or wider thing and just want to retweet funny cat pictures or whatever. They'll never move. It is a lot of effort for something they just don't care about.
And the enthusiasts? Well, now they're dealing with a fragmented community, where some of their contacts are on one service and some are on the other but a majority are on both because let's be honest, all the new Mastodon folks aren't burning their Twitter bridges behind them.
They start out posting everything on Mastodon. Then they realize they're leaving lots of people out, and they start posting everything on both platforms. Then slowly, one post at a time, the laziness sets in and before you know it they're posting exclusively on Twitter and wondering whatever happened to that promising Mastodon thing. The tide goes back out.
Your mistake is thinking Twitter users were normal users to begin with.
Twitter users have always been weird. There's a reason the user base never really grew after hitting a certain plateau. It's always catered to chronically online, media savvy, news obsessed types.
They are by definition enthusiasts.
> The people who don't think about Twitter as a community or wider thing and just want to retweet funny cat pictures or whatever.
You're describing Facebook and Instagram, not Twitter.
> They start out posting everything on Mastodon. Then they realize they're leaving lots of people out, and they start posting everything on both platforms. Then slowly, one post at a time, the laziness sets in and before you know it they're posting exclusively on Twitter
People weren't even doing that with Twitter.
The people who actually made Twitter successful--the celebrities, news sources, "influencers, etc--have always had a presence on multiple social media platforms, whether it was Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, etc.
If Mastodon is successful, it's just gonna be another one of those platforms.
And hence, this article.