We are at the cusp of becoming the #1 Lemmy instance, which is very exciting. But I wish there was a better way of informing casual users about lemmy and how easy it is to join and use. I don’t think most people need to (or want to) know the intricacies of the Fediverse, but it sounds overwhelming and complicated to them, and as a result they won’t even give it a try, when in fact joining lemmy.world to post on c/cats is no more complicated than doing it on r/cats. I wish we could put ads on YouTube, or on on a billboard or something to tell them/show them that! Lemmy (and Fediverse) will only truly be successful if/when the casual users join.
I think it’s possible – there’s people using email every day all around the world, and really the fediverse isn’t much more complicated than email.
Posted some advice below, but regarding this I’d add: don’t get caught in the weeds of the tech details. Non-tech folks aren’t really interested in federation/ActivityPub, regardless of these being selling points to tech folks.
More important, at least imo, is just pointing them to the instance you’re on and explaining that it can reach a number of other folks.
You might be like, “Hey, so, you’re on Reddit, right? I’m on a similar site called lemmy.fbxl.net, and it’s pretty cool. You can post like you do there but actually reach people across a bunch of other sites instead of just Reddit!” or something like that. Whatever keeps it in terms that don’t get too techy for those that aren’t into that stuff.