What I'm trying to say is that every social network has it's quirks that you just need to learn. The willingness to learn also depends on how attractive the platform is. With time i see no reason for lemmy to not grow like reddit did.

If you just google "Lemmy" one of the first results is https://join-lemmy.org/ where you are directed to an instance that suits you. Far from perfect but Lemmy is still young.

People probably don't even really need to understand federation. They just need sane defaults to get started and work from there.

The only additional step you have on lemmy is choosing an instance and honestly it does not even matter that much which you choose. I'm not saying it's trivial but it is nothing that is inherently more difficult.

Reddit was really strange compared to everything else a few years ago. It only appears easy now because we are familiar with the concept of subreddits now.

Yes, especially with Ramstein located in Germany being an important global hub for the US.

I remember joining reddit when it had the old interface and thinking that it is super unintuitive and complicated compared to all other social media. This didn't stop reddit from growing and i don't think lemmy will be restricted by this in the long run. People generally are just not aware of the fediverse and how it works yet but they will get used to it.

So far I've heard quite a few people say we should focus more on getting the stuff we depend on from Europe, but I'm not sure if these people were still as supportive if it meant that they have to pay a little bit more.

Yeah something like that happend for me too, and later I counted too little because it would not recognise some possible solutions. Finally I solved it by just walking along the path and at each location put an obstacle in front of it and then check if the changed map results in a path enters longer than 10000 steps. Not pretty but at least it lead to the right result with a runtime of ~3 seconds. I would have saved a lot of time if I had tried the "brute force" way before, so I guess lesson learned.