Normies are going to take one look at the list of Lemmy instance and say ”nope.” So that leaves mostly us technical minded folks. So then, why would I use Lemmy over HN?

To be honest, I (as a techy myself) thought the same when I checked out Lemmy for the first time. Once I realized that most of the big instances are already federated anyway and that I can see all their posts when I browse All, my doubts were gone. It’s really not that much of a hurdle, even for non tech savvy people.