The average person is going to have no idea what “federated” means. They’ll probably assume it has something to do with the federal gov.

The biggest advantage of federated social media is that there’s multiple servers. I know it can be a rough point for new users, but most people can just join whatever the largest server is and they’ll be perfectly fine. You need to pick a server because lemmy isn’t one website, and it shouldn’t be one website. People should be able to host an instance if they disagree with another one’s moderation/rules, and spreading the load across many servers helps to prevent large scale downtime when servers go down. All of these advantages can coexist with new users just being pointed to lemmy.world.

You don’t need to research and choose a server, unless you have personal issues. I get the impression that some people are so polarized they feel like logging into the wrong server would put them on the Wrong Side and make them evil. Some also can’t let go of the corporate media mindset that says domination is necessary for survival, or even that a contest is necessary. I just enjoy the content and ignore the complaints about numbers. The concept of multiple servers might keep some people away if they think they need to understand it, but they really don’t.