I feel like the people I interact with irl don’t even know how to boot from a USB. People here probably know how to do some form of coding or at least navigate a directory through the command line. Stg I would bet money on the average person not even being able to create a Lemmy account without assistance.
Yes it is. Because immediately you are faced with having to pick a server. And then grasp and navigate the fediverse, which depending on the use case is not as straightforward. There’s generally more hoops to make things happen. Depending on the server you pick, the UI is not all that intuitive. And then you have things like mbin forks which swap terminology.
So no harder than email then
Signing up to Gmail is way more streamlined than any Lemmy instance sign up
There’s that echo chamber at play
That accounts for some users I guess, there’s probably also some who stumble upon some instance directly and don’t learn about federation until some time after they register