I kinda write biased so I could spur precisely this sort of stimulating response. What will it mean when the large cluster of people aren't quite as readily available though... and finding the hidden communities is once again about being 'in the know'... I'm really just musing over here as I watch the world...

Framing everything in terms of winners and losers is an unfortunate condition. As users who tend to enjoy niche things, we should understand this easily.

I don't think it's *super *confusing. I've been playing with it an hour and already feel ready to go. It helps that the first thing on Lemmy.World is an explainer for how communities and servers work. I had a bit of confusion coming from join lemmy to lemmy world.

Having recently taught my completely tech illiterate mother how to sign up and use Reddit I would say it's not any more complex at it's core to a low level user. 'Sign up here, join communities, off you go!' and just skip explaining the back end of it all. She still doesn't get Reddit as an aggregate service but she understandings searching for gardening, and joining the gardening sub gives her gardening posts on her front page.

I think improving onboarding on the Join Lemmy will go a long way to lowering the barrier for entry, offering up simple explanations will make it seem less intimidating. Like the time's people suggest using Lemmy I've seen they explain what it is instead of just being like "It's like reddit, sign up here {Insert server here}." To a low level user how it works won't really matter as long as their personal server continues to exist.