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I feel like most successful social networks tend to have grown a bit like that tbh.

You get the super techy early adopters, then you get the tech enthusiasts, then you get the regular tech literate and finally the network effect is strong enough to get everyone else remotely interested to sign up.

I'd say that also probably correlates to an inverted progression of people willing to put up with bugs, missing functionality and perhaps a bit more of a wild west as people figure out how they're going to interact with the network and the people on it.

The demographics of Reddit from 15 years ago were nothing like on Reddit 5 years ago and those are nothing like that which make up Reddit today.

Welcome to anything that isn't mainstream.
Altough I've had this talk with some people and I have to agree, most projects that are open source, foss, federated, selfhosted and such... are either cumbersome, requiere technical know-how, are complex (either to use, setup or update), think that command-line is good for everyone or have no users (or the userbase is questionable [and I don't mean porn, I mean like voats was]).
Centralized services just work, that's how you get the approval of people willing to try (without technical knowledge) and without the money to buy servers or upgrades.

The rest will follow influencers, brands/products or goverment accounts, so we're pretty much at lost there.

reddit wasn't always the reddit we know today. It went through a lot of changes over the years, a lot of improvements. I see lemmy (and lemmy.one) as in that early stage. I had hoped to bring people with me from the exchristian community on reddit, but it doesn't look like I'm going to be very successful.

Which isn't to say that I'm giving up. Just that it's not going to be as easy as I hoped.

That doesn't sound so bad, the problem with making it so that everyone can use it is that suddenly you've got everyone using it. Personally I could do without the low-effort memes and copypasta comments, and I can just browse Reddit for ten minutes if I do need that fix!

I already prefer using Lemmy over reddit. I can't see anything that would make me go back. Even if it stops growing today.

Reddit was not exactly easy to use in the beginning. In fact the classic interface was kinda a disaster, even if it was still better than new.reddit

Well I'm nearly 60, a Redditor from the Digg exodus days and I'm here. Not really sure wtf is going on but I'm sure over the next few weeks I'll get there. This is it now, I deleted everything else SM wise, everything gone. Just fed up with it all but I feel I need an outlet for my ideas and opinions!

It's really not that complicated, and I only expect it to get more stream lined as time goes on.

That being said I probably am in the tinkerer/kinda sorta tech savvy demo that would say that.

That's a feature, not a bug. Better discussions and content will come from people willing to do and learn new things.