To be honest I feel like even that’s too complicated. Most people don’t really care about the great technology behind the product; they just want a product that works. That’s in part why the current large social media networks are so large; registration is so easy. The moment you add friction in the form of learning how federation works, normal users will become jaded and just decide not to join the network. If the goal right now is to improve the network effect offered by lemmy, we need to do as much as possible to minimize the amount of people we turn away.

This isn’t to say that we should focus completely on the “default instances”. I agree that ultimately the goal should be to have people move to smaller instances which take advantage of more of lemmy’s wider philosophy. But I think that the first step should be to introduce people to the concept of the fediverse, and then have them interact with it as intended.