I believe that is more valid for Mastodon instances than for Lemmy ones.

Except that you are still correct in the operational sense that most will not bother. See e.g. the migration to BlueSky rather than Mastodon.

PieFed really might make for a qualitative shift though, in offering so many options such as categories of communities (akin to multi-Reddits), and polling, and flairs (both user and post) that Reddit users were used to and it makes them feel really like they are “slumming it” coming over to Lemmy that lacks all of that. The categories of communities and user-customizable and shareable feeds in particular really help with “content discovery”, as too does PieFed’s wizard that walks a first-time user through the process of setting up and joining what the user indicates that they are interested in.

In contrast, Lemmy users are supposed to go… (somewhere? but where? where are these "somewhere"s ever mentioned? on a side-bar somewhere? extremely rarely I would believe they might be, but the vast majority of the time usually not) to find the content that they want to see. Often they end up browsing All rather than Subscribed, and get so frustrated with that that they simply leave Lemmy altogether, and then report their complaints over in r/RedditAlternatives. PieFed solved that particular problem though, as well as several others, so at this point I think any discussion about “the learning curve” needs to be split into one for Lemmy, where it really does remain too complicated for the average Reddit non-technical normie, vs. PieFed where it does not anymore.

And I need to be careful or else this will turn into a HUGE tangent, but also the political extremism and bOtH sIdEs SaMe-ism on “Lemmy” is an enormous turn-off for people as well. Yes they can block each troll on an individual basis, or the same with communities, no they can’t TRULY block an entire instance (that horribly mis-named function would have been better termed a “community muting” rather than “instance blocking”, which still allows comments from users on that instance to appear everywhere else, plus able to reply and even trigger notifications, etc. - IT IS NOT A BLOCK). Anyway, how this relates is that mainstream non-technical normies just get overwhelmed, and don’t enjoy the political extremism having to be an opt-out rather than opt-in feature, with most of the ways presented by the software to opt-out not TRULY opting “out” rather than merely claiming to do so. In contrast, one of the first things that PieFed does is to set up a block-list of keywords, offering the options All, None, and even a third one Some to allow the content at a lower frequency. I have never put any words into it… but I appreciate that the feature exists, for the sake of those who want / need it to be able to enjoy their social media of choice.

I predict that for all these reasons plus a few others, Lemmy will continue to die off. The die-hard userbase seems not to care actually, even being oddly proud of this? While PieFed - which just increased its userbase +400% - will continue to grow, and maybe PieFed will actually be the thing that captures more of the Reddit users. Lemmy certainly will not be, nor Mbin, and I cannot say for certain that PieFed will, just that it seems to me to be the only thing that possibly could (Sublinks seems dead in the water atm, due to the primary - only? - dev having a baby).