Sure, but the complaints I see are never “I don’t see content there that I like”, it’s always “its too complicated and I can’t sign up/see content at all”
but if you make it to any Lemmy site, you’re right there on the home feed instantly, same as reddit.
So is it really a problem of users not even making it to an instance? Are they really all getting brick-walled by join-lemmy.org, or is something else going on here?
Realistically the solution would be instances moving away from the Lemmy ‘brand’. You could more easily direct users to a specific one and fast track newbies past all the fediverse details.
If we go with the email analogy, people rarely ever search for ‘email’, they just go to the specific ones they know. Then searching for lemmy gets you to places like join-lemmy.org that cares about the ecosystem, while terms analogous to gmail directs you more to a specific instance.
And I think this sort of branding model actually more compatible with the idea of decentralization. As a culture, I think we would better serve federation by directly linking and promoting our preferred instances, rather than harping on about federation and the lemmyverse.