Interestingly, there has been some polls about the age of Mastodon users. Generally they point towards users being rather old for the standards of a new tech platform.

Here’s one poll by @futurebird, with 459 respondents. Half are gen X, and almost 10% are boomers.

I would guess the average age of the Threadiverse might be lower, but it seems the Fediverse has some appeal across generations. I suspect that those of us who remember the indie internet from days of yore might find the Fediverse more intuitive than gen Z who are discovering the beautiful chaos for the first time.

Edit: Here’s another poll by @mcneely showing the same results with 26 750 respondents: Half the respondents are 41-60 years old, 10% are older than 60.

There’s nothing inherently confusing about the protocol. It just needs UX improvements. Meta has a few billion in product research and experience they could use to improve the protocol immensely.