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.
It’s a but disappointing to still not have any app on the AppStore. I know it’s a long process, but we should take advantage from the current momentum, which won’t last.
Yep, we’ll see!