Some people avoid those because they tend to consist entirely of people that support banning non-approved ideas that the real world considers non-controversial. That's why X hasn't disappeared like some of the HN crowd predicted.
And while it hasn't disappeared, it's losing ground to Pinterest.
Is it? I haven't seen a Pinterest link in a while so I guess it depends on what bubble you're in.
It's no secret, meanwhile, that twitter has seen steady declines both in daily active users as well as plummeting engagement levels from those that haven't left yet.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/pins-gains...
What's an example?
It works because the sites belonging to one type can all see the content of other sites of the same type. To the user, each individual site is as convenient as a conventional social media site such as x/twitter. It aims to combine the advantages of decentralization such as independence, with the advantages of centralization such as a large amount of content
One roadblock is marketing, because the first thing the fediverse sites like mastodon or Lemmy try to do when you search for them on Google is get you into a server. That sounds too technical and is not how the average person uses social media at all. Bluesky fixes this and has an entirely new idea for how the fediverse works.
One downside to the concept of servers is that besides feeling fragmented to the average user compared to bluesky or Instagram, most tend to cater to a specific audience so they filter content for you. It's not like bluesky or Instagram where the user does it entirely from scratch by following accounts (which Instagram ignores anyways)
That's how it should work but its not how it works in practice because some admin can't stand the idea of opinions contrary to their own existing on the same network. So they deferedate from instances they don't like as well as those instances that don't do the same.
..meanwhile, X is owned by such a person.