It isn’t hard to sign up for. No one is saying that is the case. It gets confusing when people start talking about adding subscriptions from other instances and how you can copy and paste the link and subscribe. That right there is where 95% of the people on the internet stop caring.
If the developers of Lemmy and the wider Fediverse ever get that fleshed out in an intuitive way I think popularity will go pretty fast.
That and long term if there is a way for information to be collectively backed up so that if some owner shuts down an instance everything isn’t gone.
I don’t understand people who say they can’t figure out Lemmy or KBin
Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt....