Personal story: I've been interested in the Fediverse for around a year now, actively participating with a collectively owned instance for the last 6 months (through a 20yo forum we decided to reboot as a fedi instance).

First we tried every platform that seemed interesting to us based on some requirements we had set. We were not big fans of Twitter so we weren't drawn to Mastodon either. The one we liked the most was #Calckey, which was still in its first steps back then. So, even though I don't code, I was very interested in how the platform can be improved, so I started participating in Calckey's forge at codeberg, with bug reports, ideas, suggestions etc. Fast forward a few months, now I'm community manager at Calckey and involved in organizing development, and many of my suggestions have affected the platform. And one of my main goals as community manager is to keep building a welcoming, inclusive community where you can be heard, provide feedback, contribute with code if you're a dev, in general where you can be actively involved in the project, to the extent and in the ways that you can - and more people keep joining and expanding the broader community. So yes, I know I can influence the direction of the fediverse, to an extent of course, or at least how users of the same platform experience the fediverse - and even though we're not as big as Mastodon, still, part of the magic of the fediverse is exactly that it's this big mosaic of different and diverse open source projects, so I think that's worth something.

I do believe we can all find a project (or more!) that fits us and, collectively, influence the #fediverse. It is what we're making it!

Yes, but that's a different question, though. There's valuable insight in these results, they show that there is a need to better educate people on what the fediverse really is, and the importance of active participation.