I agree, for something like this to take off, you need someone to invest heavily up front in creating a user experience which is worth using - which means content.
The tech is the easy part, you need to have a place that is worth going before the tech will be utilized.
And if someone posted a link to a page about the reddit software (which isn't open-source anymore, but was for a long time), you'd also say "this isn't reddit", because the descriptive page doesn't show a front page, but you need to actually go to somewhere the software is installed to see it? That's two clicks!
Run a server / join a server is just your first setup step. After that you join Communities and while these can exist on any other server that yours is federating with (Lemmy has an allowlist for this), you interact with them from your own account on your own chosen server. The federation stuff is now mostly hidden to you, and the default filtered timeline shows stuff from you subscribed communities.
The tech is the easy part, you need to have a place that is worth going before the tech will be utilized.