The fediverse is about options. If you don’t like how someone else runs their platform or community you can create your own. It’s awesome because you don’t get locked into one platform. And in the future I think we will see more big companies and organisations running their own stuff. But I agree that at the moment it is not what “normal people” are looking for and it will take quite some time until it develops. But to be fair the same was the case for reddit.

What I’m trying to say is that every social network has it’s quirks that you just need to learn. The willingness to learn also depends on how attractive the platform is. With time i see no reason for lemmy to not grow like reddit did.

If you just google “Lemmy” one of the first results is https://join-lemmy.org/ where you are directed to an instance that suits you. Far from perfect but Lemmy is still young.

People probably don’t even really need to understand federation. They just need sane defaults to get started and work from there.

The only additional step you have on lemmy is choosing an instance and honestly it does not even matter that much which you choose. I’m not saying it’s trivial but it is nothing that is inherently more difficult.

Reddit was really strange compared to everything else a few years ago. It only appears easy now because we are familiar with the concept of subreddits now.

I remember joining reddit when it had the old interface and thinking that it is super unintuitive and complicated compared to all other social media. This didn’t stop reddit from growing and i don’t think lemmy will be restricted by this in the long run. People generally are just not aware of the fediverse and how it works yet but they will get used to it.