Marques in particular has been critical of the fediverse for being too complicated for the average user. I don’t blame him entirely - talk of different servers and federation is pretty confusing. Even for a tech savvy person, it takes some time to really understand it.

At least the second problem should mostly be solved with a third party app. If you take a Reddit user on RIF and give them jerboa, it should be basically the same experience. Just the sign-up experience might be confusing, and jerboa could use some bug fixes.