To continue the analogy, if nobody understands how to purchase from your store or even what the store is, you're not going to stay in business. That's why I think Lemmy needs to bring the UI/UX up to industry design standards and simplify a LOT.

The abundance of controls and information is nice for power users, but it scares away the newbies who already think Lemmy is too complicated. Go to any other major social media site and check out how they bury/simplify/remove choices from users to not overload them. Don't get me wrong, I think the UIs that provide all that info should definitely exist (think RES) but should not be the default.

The other thing is the sign up process: join-lemmy.org is what people have be telling folks to look at if they want to join, and it immediately gets into the nitty gritty of tech specs and servers and other things that the average Joe doesn't know about and may get intimidated by.

This has been my nearly universal feedback when telling non-techie people about Lemmy. I know I may get pilloried for saying it since there is a lot of hate for big social media companies on here, but a lot of what they do works and I think we can copy some of that without losing the magic of federated social media & opposition to big corporations.