And also, Friendica is not easy to use for new users, documentation isn't great, the very best theme is meh in terms of appearance and usability, and there are severe performance issues preventing large instances from being functional. This is coming from someone who really likes Friendica and wants it to succeed.

I was trying to preempt the argument that picking an instance is confusing and is the big "ease of use" barrier. Which it probably would be, except that most people don't bother with that: they just sign up with the big one. I don't mean to imply that's a good thing, I agree that a stronger system to distribute users among instances would be cool, but I don't think it would make a difference in the number of people joining in the first place. I think that network effect is easily the biggest hurdle, and there's not much we can do about it systematically outside of keeping the network we do have alive and making incremental improvements. I'm not sure there's any killer feature we could invent that would really swing the needle. Bigger, better funded orgs than us have tried.

Otherwise, it's just about us as individuals, doing what we can to push the people in our lives away from corporate social media.