You can't be on what amounts to the bleeding edge of Social Media and expect your friends to be as well unless they're all nerds that actually care about such things (like all of us clearly are).
No social media site started with millions of users and all of your friends. They all started small, and slowly grew to that size.
Well said, the problem is, I post nothing on instagram. So my presence on pixelfed is not at all a reason for anyone in my circle to join lol. I imagine since we're all the nerds of our families/friend-groups here, this is probably the case for a lot of us.