How exactly is it hard to enter the fediverse ? Yes, you need to spend time to understand what you're going into, to understand the lingo, the rules, the etiquette. But it's normal, because Mastodon is not Twitter2, the fediverse is not the usual social networks. It's a new world, you have to understand why it's different.
If Google ever speaks AP I won't be surprised to see it defederated from many instances. It will create a schism, and that's perfectly ok because the expectations are different.
Well, I found it straightforward, so you'd have to ask the many people who are saying they found it difficult. The most common issue I've noticed is "how do I pick a server". For that reason, I think 'big name' servers may be necessary for widespread adoption.
But do we want widespread adoption ? It'd be nice if people used federated/decentralized means of communication, but the objective is not to reproduce the schema of domination and control by a few people in the majority; taking control back is the basis of building the Fediverse. As long as people don't go through the process of understanding the structures of power, we won't have made any progress.
Well, just as I want as many people as possible to have email addresses that I can use to send messages to them, it would be useful for me for as many people as possible to have the equivalent for more public communication. I think that's a separate issue from power structures.
People always complain that MS does the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish model but they never remember or refuse to acknowledge that a lot of these other big tech companies have and continue to do that the same thing
XMPP is but one of many protocols that were adopted by Big Tech, then once market share was achieved they took their users and walked away from the open internet
Google used to host the biggest xmpp server (google talk), and then they defederated from the rest of the network.