At the moment federation between platforms is not useful. The only advantage is federation between Instances. I’ve used my sister at a test for what the average woman would think about it.
Aspects she thinks is cool are that it’s owned by people and designed for people, that its left leaning and inclusive.
Aspects she doesn’t care about are privacy, lack of ads, federation between instances, federation between platforms.
Aspects she doesn’t like are her friends aren’t there, none of the accounts she like are there, no recommendation algorithm. She also hates the name fediverse.
I think that we need to stop being boomers clutching our chronological feed and word of mouth discovery and embrace algorithms. That’s not to say we can have chronological feeds it’s just that we should include and option and serve some form of content recommendations.
I also think threads will be a major player in drawing people in. Its easier to convince people who use Instagram to switch from Twitter to threads than Twitter to Mastodon. Once they’re on threads they can start being a part of the fediverse and then eventually they might decide to try out one of the instances.