Here's me, commenting. I can't subscribe to what I want easily. That's a problem for mainstream uptake. Don't get me wrong I can subscribe to stuff... It's the easy part that's missing
It did seemly weirdly awkward to do something as basic as subscribing in the basic web UI. I have felt a lot of roadblocks to joining and interacting that would definitely put off novice or disinterested users.
Yes. I see a lot of comments on Reddit like "I tried Lemmy, but you have to sign up for every instance", because it's so opaque how you can subscribe to different instances. Personally, I copy the "handle", add it to my URL manually, then subscribe. But this is nothing any mainstream user would do.