This is why the well-known people who come here (or those who get boosted by someone big, right away), love how they get lots and lots of interaction really fast, whereas normal people just languish for days or weeks and then leave again.

And it's not because they aren't replying to other people. They reply, they get a response, then it's over. Their replies don't lead to being followed-back, and everyone looks only at follows, so it's like trying to break a glass ceiling.

This onboarding experience is actually much WORSE than when I first got here, and lots of people were surfing global, so just posting notes into the void got you new followers. That ended because the big relays turned into nothing but porn and spam, after the eGirls showed up, so we all switched to OnlyFollows.

The better solution is to use smaller relays, that don't have a bunch of porn and spam, but the outbox model hadn't been popularized, yet. I feel like this better solution is languishing because of feed-inertia, but I'm hoping personal relays will end that.