What do you mean by "too much work"? I joined both lemmy.world and lemmy.ca yesterday (just to see how federation worked) and it was very quick and seamless. No more difficult than joining Reddit. You don't need to join multiple servers either, just one.

> What do you mean by "too much work"? I joined both lemmy.world and lemmy.ca yesterday

I joined the former today and can't log in. (That's fine. Scaling difficulties are a champagne problem.)

But first I had to spend about half an hour reading comments here to identify lemmy.world, as well as confirm I wasn't joining e.g. the Nazi server. I still don't understand what power I'm giving the admins of that server. I started looking into another server to join, but after looking at more posts, I'm not seeing a discussion that's pulling me in right now.

I don't want to look for data and join things. I don't have to do that on reddit. Overall I would say even with blackouts, reddit is still more interesting.

Yep. But I do genuinely think there is a path to adoption, not with a centralized source, but a centralized "sink" (the client). The "aggregation theory" model could apply here, and the Apollo/RIF apps have a unique opportunity to implement it, because they already have a loyal user base to bootstrap activity across whichever Lemmy backend(s) their users prefer.

Another feature that would help with bootstrapping would be something like a "Reddit bridge," i.e. a Lemmy instance that proxies requests to Reddit and allows you to authenticate your Reddit account so you can read it and post comments to it like any other Lemmy instance.