I think it’s not helped by the fact that most early adopters are “techies” who enjoy talking about the underlying tech.

The average user doesn’t really need to understand this whole fediverse thing to sign up and use Lemmy. We could just have a website with a big sign up button that randomly (to load balance) selects an instance from a whitelist and signs the user up there to get them started. But instead we have GitHub docs with detailed comparisons of various instances, and long discussions about underlying protocols and what the federation means and how that’s different from centralized platforms.