I disagree with you, yes, ease of use will come for power users, but in the end it’s the diversity of people interacting with the platform that creates communities with valuable content. And to attract more people the platform needs less friction at on-boarding.
In their current state, definitely not. There is a real bubble effect browsing on Lemmy because it feels like 1 post out of 3 is just praising the platform, but I think they’re far from ready to become mainstream. I’d say there are for now 2 major problems:
The global instability (a lot of bugs, many third party apps, but a poor on-boarding with the main website).
It was made by engineers and marketed by engineers. The federated aspect should IMO be public and known, but seamless. It should be possible to just create an account and start browsing without having to do some research on how the thing works. The technical aspect of the fediverse is great, but it’s also its main drawback, I believe that hiding it for newcomers could be a way of not scaring them.
Still trying to get into Tears of the Kingdom after 50 hours. I absolutely loved BOTW but I really have trouble feeling involved with TOTK, it feels like I’ve already played the game. They slightly changed everything just a bit, just enough to change the gameplay feeling but not enough for me to feel the same appeal to explore the world.
Honestly yes, at first I really thought Lemmy could replace it but the content is just bad on Lemmy’s all. The platform is good, but when 60% of posts are shitty memes or shitpost it just kills it for me. I still browse Lemmy almost every day, but I really feel like we spoiled the momentum we had a few weeks ago.