Recently had to help my mom figure out her new internet setup. She wanted to keep her old phone number but it was not carried over to the new provider. My guess is she said that she wanted to keep it while ordering the new one but never followed any of the steps they gave her to make that work. So we called them and it was crazy how she was unable to explain to them what her current situation is and what needs to be fixed. Claiming that “nothing works” even though the internet works just fine and the only problem is the phone number. Also not really looking at the emails they send her and following the steps to activate the online service center where she could manage this stuff on her own.

Later I showed her that the laptop she got from work is able to connect to her new router wirelessly and does not have to be connected via cable. She already uses another laptop and her phone over wifi. Apparently she just has no interest in understanding how any of the internet systems work.

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.