Two things matter: (1) Content (2) Accessibility to the content.

For (1), we need more active participations and generate more content.

For (2), the mechansim of remote community discovery and subscription are still very tedious and error prone. Not only the remote community is not visible to the instance (Yes I know it's lazy fetching but it still does not work somehow for some remote community subscriptions), but also the lack of integration of community browser are still hard for general users.

In the last few days I have spent countless hours to try community subscriptions on a number of instances.

IMO, everybody tries to explain what fediverse is, instances are, how they work, so on, and so forth. That's what is pushing people away. Just point them to one place. Lemmy.world seems to have the least friction to signup (no approval, only email confirmation), while also hosting a lot of communities. Just tell people to signup on lemmy.world, and search for whatever communities they want to join, and subscribe to the one with most subscribers. That should be enough. No need to 'educate' them on how fediverse works.

I'm going to take a risky stance and say getting onboard isn't actually hard. I didn't learn anything or read anything to get in, I just kind of poked a few buttons and wrote two sentences about why I'm joining.

That said, the gumption to A) try anything new and B) write two cogent sentences might just be enough to deter a few people, and that's no bad thing. The site(s) don't need to become profitable, so it's kind of a non-issue who joins or not.

If lemmy every becomes mainstream the implementation details will be completely lost to people, and that's ok. You can try explaining someone what a web browser is, but people will still say "I opened google" or even "I opened internet" instead of "I opened chrome". With lemmy there will probably be a few huge instances that people just gravitate to, and if/when something goes wrong, communities will have to migrate, and users will have to try to get into a new instance.

Not once there's a more feature rich app. Seriously, that's all it will take. My wife is as "mainstream" as it gets, and her only objections to, trying lemmy as a whole is that the ux sucks in browsers and the only two apps that are really available lack features that should be there (like the links on jerboa not going to the right place), and little things like being able to organize subscriptions or do an in-app "multi".

My sister said pretty much the same thing. Out of my main group of friends, none are exactly "into" things like this, and only one said he'd never bother with it at all (and he hated reddit long before anyway). These are fairly casual users of social media of any kind, they aren't power users, they're the average joe. I was able to explain to them exactly how to use lemmy in less than five minutes.

The only other objection that wasn't more of an app thing is the signup delay. That's a bigger barrier to entry than anything else, and it isn't something a friendly user can help with, unlike finding new communities or how to navigate.

What this reminds me of (and yes, showing my age here) is the text based Usenet groups of old. It's kind of clunky but feels real the same way.

In my opinion, the fact that you feel it's a question worth asking is an answer in itself - absolutely it is.

Yea I think these are all fair points. And I guess when I say mainstream I don't mean individuals that churn out low effort farming posts, but rather people who contribute legitimate content/discussion but are pretty ignorant when it comes to internet/tech.

The other thing is--with various forums dedicated to the same content, i.e. technology hosted at beehaw/lemmy.ml/lemmy.world+ it seems like that could potentially hinder growth? Or that it seems superfluous to have multiple forums accessible from one platform dedicated to the same thing but with varying content

Yeah, for sure. I'm not sure I really mind that, though. It's also not super crazy to get a basic handle on, so if it becomes popular enough, more people will be willing to try to figure it out. I also imagine that the developers working on it will try to find more intuitive ways for users to get started.

I don't really care too much about the mainstream coming here, though. Part of the appeal of the Fediverse, I feel, is that it's got that kind of "underground" vibe to it. We are out of the mainstream, but there are still people around, discussion is happening, content is being created. It has a fresh and unique feel to it.

I mean, it sounds confusing, but it's also why all this works... So I mean, who cares? Baby meet bathwater, etc.

@drubbis Doesn't make sense in my opinion. If you turn off federation it's basically just another Reddit