That was true 13+ years ago, when most normies didn’t even have a FB account, let alone a reddit account. Back then reddit was mostly full of geeks, they know how to upload images on pix hosts, that was never a problem for them, and it isn’t now, that’s why we use Lemmy, dispite of it lacking a lot of things that a social media platform in 2023 is most definitely supposed to have. But, we don’t care. Normies care. The don’t like having to switch 10 different apps to upload an image, to have to copy/paste comm URLs in search because your instance still doesn’t federate with the instance with the comm that you’d like to join, they don’t like not being able to follow users (Lemmy still doesn’t support that), they don’t like having 50 different apps that basically do the same thing (which, of course, it’s the whole point of joining an open source network, choice). They want consitency, which is the only thing that the fediverse will never have, and the whole point of even having a fediverse (you don’t like a policy on an instance? fine, move, no one’s stopping you 🤷). When you take away consitency from them, they feel overwhelmed and this thing is just too complicated, end of story.
See, normies were never a part of forums, IRC, BBSes. They’re late internet adopters. They have no idea how things were, that different servers might have different rules, some require SSL, some don’t, others might wan’t you to register the uname with an email, etc. They will never get the defederated aspect of the fediverse. It’s like speaking some alien language to them, it simply does not compute. Corporate centealized media is all they know.