Though creating a lemmy account is not that complex. Typically all you have to do is fill out a form on the websiten instructions included. The problem there is not the tech literacyn but the willingness of the people to even interact with systems they don’t know, like finding a home instance or understanding the concept of the fediverse. Most people could create a lemmy account, though also most people wouldn’t.

Spot on, it feels complicated because they don't understand what's being asked. I've said this before previously, but most people have no concept of frontends and backends. For most people, Twitter is just something that's on their phone, and it uses the internet to see what other people have in their Twitter apps on their phones.

Because internet usage and software generally is like 99.999% commercial, even the idea of closed and open source probably doesn't make sense to a lot of people. "Check out Mastodon, it's like Twitter but anyone can host it" would mean nothing to the average user. I'm on the absolute lower end of tech literacy in this community, so it's constantly apparent how much my Lemmy friends overestimate the general population.

Edit: To be clear, I say that non-critically. The tech industry has made it so astonishingly easy to interact with incredibly complicated systems, but they exploit the resulting ignorance for profit and market share because it severely limits our agency to choose something less antagonistic.

Tbh, getting into lemmy is quite a bit more complex than e.g. into Instagram or other centralized social media platforms.

Compare this:

• Choose which social media platform to use and land on Instagram
• Download the instagram app from the default store of your phone's OS
• Create an account
• Done

with:

• Choose which social media platform to use and land on Lemmy
• Choose which app to use. There's like 20 of them, some great some not so, some active, some abandoned. There's no guide or anything, so you'll have to google and/or try 5 of them to find one you like.
• Choose which instance to use. There are literally hundreds of them and you don't even know where to start. You have no information, but this choice is central to the kind of lemmy experience you will get.
• Google and find join-lemmy.org. Now you got a one-liner for each instance together with user count. So naively you sort by activity and land on lemmy.ml.
• Create an account
• Figure out what .ml stands for.
• Repeat step 3-5 because account transfers between instances don't work.
• Repeat step 3-5 because you landed on the likes of lemmy.ee or feddit.de, and the instance closed down
• Done, until your instance closes down

Slight hyperbole here, but choosing an app and instance alone is complicated enough to scare away lots of people.

There's a comment above this who incredulously exclaims "boot from a USB drive‽" and I can tell you as someone who does tech support, that may be legitimately 1% of the US population.

People are lazier than ever now. Thats one reason I dont like the tech illiterate normies. Its SO EASY so learn how to use the tools you interact with 24/7. But they are lazy.

Ok booting from USB can't be that advanced is it? I mean you just plug the thing in then mash F2 on startup, select the USB from the boot menu which is no more complex than browsing a picture folder and hit save and start.