I don’t think this is necessarily a problem. People who’d rather just be on a big platform and not worry about federation and open source and the technical aspects can do so by joining a big instance, and have pretty much the same experience they’d have on any centralized platform. People who’d rather have more understanding of and control over their experience of the federated network can host their own instance, or join a smaller instance belonging to someone with similar ideas as them, and can still interact with the larger communities by federating with them. As long as the big instances like lemmy.ml continue federating with the smaller instances like mine, I’m happy.

I think it would be fantastic if people who migrated to lemmy were comfortable choosing an instance and spreading out to different places and keeping things very decentralized. But realistically I think that most people are not interested in making those kinds of choices, and just want to go to a webpage, sign up, and start browsing memes with as few clicks and as few choices as possible.

As another commenter has mentioned, though, adding account migration would probably help a lot. Then people can make a choice without feeling locked in, or go the least-resistance route initially but still make a choice later on without losing all of their account history.