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.

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.