Yesterday I learned that Lemmy is the pinnacle of complicated due to the separation between instances (servers) and apps.
IMO it's equally complicated like signing up for an email provider and setting up the email app on the average smartphone.
That's not lemmy specific that's the whole point of it and all fediverse apps. They don't lock you in their app or ecosystem. Your comparison with emails is actually the whole point, you can use Gmail with any client and send and receive mails from any other mail platform like Proton. The fact you need two separate pieces is exactly what makes the fediverse resilient.
People need to learn to get over this barrier because the complexity is just a psychological barrier, it's self imposed after years of walled gardens that take you by the hand to lock the door behind. People need to learn a bit more complexity just like they're not gonna escape having their attention spans destroyed without accepting the difficulty of focusing on longer form media. It will take effort to dig ourselves out of the hellhole that the internet became. It's not going to happen with one click or without friction because it's been made hard on purpose to escape the simplicity.