That’s what I said. People stay on YouTube because the content is locked there. If you could watch YouTube videos from Peertube without ads, I believe people would migrate and YouTube would be forced to be less aggressive with ads. I agree that’s partly because content creators do not post their content elsewhere, but that’s exactly why fediverse is nice : the content is everywhere, you can’t lock it into a single instance.
The reason for switching from Threads to fediverse is the same reason why you already left mainstream social networks. But people not aware of its existence, or locked there because the content and the people they interact with are only accessible from there, they can’t leave. That’s why many people keep a Facebook account, or why people tried Mastodon and came back to X a few weeks later.
In my opinion, if a platform can only be different from the other because of the services it proposes (instead of relying on its own content), people will be able to move easily from one platform to the other (and they will if Threads starts to abuse its position). You are afraid people will never leave Threads, but the truth is that as soon as they will have to suffer ads, they will try to find adblockers or alternatives to eliminate them. The fediverse can be this alternative.
I don’t say it will be massively the case of course, but closing the door is the best way to prevent such migration.
If I had the opportunity to move from Twitter to Mastodon without loosing any content, I would have done it way sooner (and in fact, it’s more like I had to abandon this content since it does not exist on Mastodon, the people I followed etc).
It’s exactly why people stay inside an ecosystem like Apple, YouTube, Meta Quest or Playstation, because if you leave you lose everything.
I don’t see why more people would go to the fediverse if you prevent everyone access to some content. Just like in the fediverse, if your instance does not federate with the one you want, you are free to migrate towards another instance. It’s not possible if you can’t transfer from one instance to another.
I don’t say they are saints or that we should federate absolutely with them, but I don’t believe that closing the door because we want the fediverse to grow is not a convincing argument.