If the fediverse is to be adopted by the masses, the onboarding experience needs to change. A new user can’t be presented with a choice of instances as part of signing up or at least the process of making the choice needs to dumbed down a lot. I don’t know how or if this can be solved, I just know as someone involved in app development and UX that the current experience won’t work.
My mother would not know how to handle this paragraph: “Lemmy.world is one node in a network of hundreds of Lemmy instances. Before you sign up here, take a moment to explore all the instances at https://lemmyverse.net/. You may find an instance with a regional or topical emphasis that speaks to you! Don’t worry about being left out; Lemmy instances are interconnected so users from each instance can participate with communities on other instances.”
For mass adoption it needs to be so simple that even non-techie older people can get through it without feeling like they might be doing something wrong.
Being decentralized and there being a significantly higher bar of entry aren’t intrinsically linked. The only things easier about Reddit compared to a phpBB forum are that Reddit a) generates you a username, and b) has a mobile app that only works with reddit.com. Name generators can be included in the signup process, but we can’t really drop having to point an app at a particular website in a distributed model.
The fact that “Lemmy” isn’t a website or a single, definable place on the Internet is where the friction comes from. You can point to Reddit, and say you “saw x, y, and z on Reddit this morning” and it be a meaningful statement. You can’t substitute “Lemmy” into that sentence, though, because there isn’t a Lemmy.
There’s a thousand Lemmys.