Digital literacy not being taught to the common people is by design: the less you know about how something works, the more vulnerable you are to being exploited. Big tech corporations thrive on this by guiding the folks to their walled gardens.

Federation isn't a hard concept to teach at all, I've taught it to my kid in less than 2 minutes:

• you pick a server like you choose the address where you wanna live (has the kinds of things you'd like to interact with, be it communities or people), you'll be closer to some stuff, like this market or that bookstore, but can still freely visit places further away (other servers) and meet to the people and stuff over there.

"And how do I know which to choose?"

• There's this list here, just click the links and you can read this space here on the right side (in Lemmy's case). It's like you reading the description for which Roblox game you wanna play, for example.

Geeky people need to be able to teach at least just a little bit, I've done so for my family and it's been paying off. Lots of us complain a lot about people being "tech dumb" but make little effort to solve the issue.