Things that I think would help:

• Lower barriers to entry, especially for non-technical users. One reason that Reddit was relatively successful was because they didn't even require an email address to create an account (dunno about now, but they did so in the past). I remember reading some Web UI design article once stating that a website has on the order of a few seconds to basically sell a user on viewing it, because there's so much useless garbage out there, so people filter by basically immediately dropping anything that doesn't immediately appear to be useful.

  A new user on the Threadiverse is immediately faced with understanding a lot of technical architecture: "what home instance do I want?" Just answering that question requires understanding something about how the system works. Yeah, if you're a sysadmin who is familiar with how Usenet or other federated systems work, this is just an "ohhh" moment conceptually, though you still might need to learn a bunch of details.

  I remember reading some articles about how a lot of mobile OS-only users entering college didn't really understand the concept of a file or where data was stored. This was kind of shocking to their professors, who were familiar with personal computers, and where this is a basic concept.

  searches

  https://old.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1ftvyrb/do_many_students_nowadays_really_not_understand/

  Here are some examples of professors discussing it (the topic originally being brought up by someone who was apparently teaching a class in GNU R, so probably a data science or visualization thing).

  If that level of "where does data live" is alien and confusing to a lot of people, imagine how much more the concept of a federated system of instances is.

  I value the ability to choose different instances, different frontends, different clients, different server implementations. But...maybe throwing all of those options in a typical user's face immediately when they start using the things can be a bit overwhelming. Not saying don't have those options, but maybe people should be kinda directed towards a sane default at the get-go.

• The mechanism for remote communities to become visible to a home instance (needing someone to initially search for them) and for posts and comment in such a community to start becoming visible (at least one user subscribing to them) is not described in the Lemmy UI, is non-obvious, and impacts users.

• The syntax to link to communities in an home-instance-agnostic way is kinda complicated as well, requires people to understand something about federation to understand what it does and why you'd do it.

• Still no home-instance-agnostic way to link to posts or comments.

• A better initial set of content of interest and not having content that is objectionable to people. If you're a random person from the US and you wind up on, I dunno, lemmygrad.ml as your first impression of the Threadiverse, I expect that you're probably inclined to just walk away. Whatever is on someone's first view of the thing should be content that is something that more-or-less is something that (a) makes them want to view more and (b) not to walk away. I remember saying once that pretty much nobody objects to, say, cooking; that makes a good default.

• Discoverability of communities is still not great. Lemmyverse.net is a valuable resource, but either users need to be directed there from clients and Web UIs or some sort of vaguely-comparable functionality needs to be built into Threadiverse systems.

• Network effect still favors Reddit. I don't have a fantastic solution for this. In general, network effect massively favors social media incumbents

and I'm sure that that is why you have investors willing to sink a lot of money into getting first mover advantage in that area. That said, MySpace and Digg did ultimately become displaced by younger competitors.

• Making benefits to a given user clearer. If I'm angry about Reddit third-party client access, say, I have a clear reason to use another system. Maybe I'm an open-source developer and I'm familiar with the IRC or Usenet or mail server or XMPP ecosystems, and so "ah, it's like that, and we can have competing server implementations" just clicks. But if I'm Joe User who gets on the thing to talk smack about an opposing basketball team, maybe Joe doesn't immediately care about that or have any of that context. What's his reason to use the Threadiverse over Reddit? Are those benefits immediately clear to him?