Fediverse

I agree. It's been fun and challenging to learn even just as a user. I work in tech and it is a lot of concepts to grasp and understand. So much potential though!

“Servers? Instances? Is this a place to connect with my friends or a goddamn server room?”

That's not a property of of federation (see email and websites) it's just because early adopters are a little wired. In any new social phenomenon, it takes a second wave of adopters (first wave of followers) to bridge the wierdos from the masses.

Cue this classic study in leadership: https://youtu.be/hO8MwBZl-Vc be the first one to follow the wierdos and show the masses it's cool.

People said that about reddit, I don't think Lemmy is anywhere near being too complex for the average user. More that social medias generally favor simplicity because simplicity is easy to control, modify, and generally nudge from a developer side trying to guarantee a very specific use case that generates money, rather than just naturally occurring social systems.

Let's be real, humans have been dealing with social networks far more complex, systems more complex, for almost all of human history. The sheer volume of people, no, but the actual processes of interaction, yes.