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I still don't really get what people find so difficult about picking an instance. Most people seem to manage getting an email account, which requires picking an email provider like Gmail, Outlook, etc. Joining Lemmy isn't that much different.
I'd hazard a guess and suggest the word "instance" confuses most and puts them off.
Could continue with the email analogy and call it “provider”?
I suspect that would help
A Lemmy provider. Haha, guess that works
It is like picking an email provider, but it's like picking an email provider in the early days when there were no big players. People are more comfortable picking a provider that has a big name backing it. You even just mentioned providers from Google and Microsoft. No such options exist for Lemmy so people see all the instances and get overwhelmed. Personally it doesn't bother me because I don't care that much about my account history, but if you're a content creator you don't want to lose your account so it can be a deterrence, and other people may worry more about picking the wrong instance. I think it's also not very straightforward what the implications of picking an instance is and a lot of instances don't do a good job explaining their policies.
I think the issue is mentioning lemmy being federated and having instances in the first place, even as a tech user a senior software developer I had to learn about how it works does stuff sync up etc.
Now imagine a non techie user.
And that doesn't even mention stuff like instances being defederared from each other.
I remember trying Mastodon first, and my first reaction was, "What the fuck? I have to choose a specific sub/server?", and as I read through the list of each server that said things like "This is a community for camping enthusiasts", I found myself extremely off put, as I don't believe (at the time anyway) that anything said the server didn't matter and I would still have full access to the other boards. It sounded as though I would have to pick explicitly between a camping-centric community, a tech-centric community, a car-centric community, etc.
Lemmy was a little easier to grasp, though I did gravitate straight to Lemmy.ca because that sounded like the most practical option given what I wanted to access and where I live. But the setup process was definitely a learning curve. Eventually I wound up really liking it, but it didn't truly fall into place until Sync dropped. Now my experience is nearly indistinguishable from my past ten years on reddit, minus the constant angst, hostility, and doom scrolling.
I tried to get my tech-savvy brother on here to no avail. He showed up when a bunch of servers were being defederated and I guess he thought it was setting a bad precedent right off the bat. I'm assuming he was unknowingly on one of the bad servers and was being exposed to their bitching and complaining without realizing what was really going on with them.
We need a service called LemmyIn that does everything for you and places you in every available instance it can find, save for anything inherently bad or controversial.
It's because, like with email, the average person doesn't give a fuck what provider they choose. They want to use "Lemmy", they don't care if it's lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, etc.
It matters even less than with email, if they're using a third-party app like Sync, because it's not like they'll ever look at the instance their name is hosted on.
Because people don't explain it with good analogies like that. That's the first I heard it put that way, and I found it helpful.