This feels like suggesting that vegans just allow beef and chicken so that more people will be vegan and it'll be easier to stick with. Federation is a core tenet of the Fediverse. It's not necessarily about getting the maximum amount of new users in the shortest possible time.

If a user is super turned off by it, there's plenty of growing community forum sites they can try, like Squabbles.io, Tildes.net, Raddle.me, or Hive.blog. I personally don't think the alternative of stripping the core philosophy of federated, decentralized software out of Lemmy, Mastodon et al. is necessarily desirable.

Federation has it's complications and challenges, that can and are being met all over the Fediverse as it grows - it's not necessary to turn the entire concept on its head to gain faster user adoption. Lemmy doesn't need to be a Reddit clone - Lemmy is a direct response to the failures of the centralized web, where the main purposes are monetization and societal manipulation, where scraping the users' data is the means to someone else's ends. The Fediverse has a chance to be so much better than that, provided we don't screw it up.

All just my personal thoughts; I appreciate the conversation.