Judging from my experience trying to sign up for a Lemmy instance for the past 2 days, it's going to be hard. Unless I was doing something wrong, I can see a lot of people having difficulty signing up and eventually giving up. kbin was much easier to sign up for.
Yeah, I tried Mastodon when that first became more known. Even as a pretty literate techie (I've developed programs professionally at a fortune 500), I couldn't figure it out. Went to kbin today after reading the news about apollo and it was just like signing up anywhere else.
Lemmy may currently have larger spread by word of mouth, but if anything is going to hit mainstream it will be kbin in its current state.
Yeah, I've been a software engineer for years and I too had to have a sit down to 'figure it all out' with mastodon. Though Lemmy seems far more my style, so hopefully this gets some power behind it.