It almost seems like it is too flexible. Like, it pulls in posts from all over, which is interesting and cool. But do people join a site like Facebook to see random posts from everywhere, or do they join it to see posts from their friends?

Lemmy is good because it is a closed ecosystem. It doesn’t take in posts from every site on the fediverse. That’s not to say that it should not be an option on Friendica, but it should definitely not be the default view. Which is definitely a part of what also drives people away when they try it, I think. They don’t know how to connect with their friends, and just end up connecting with lots of random people. The fact that “list in directory” is checked no by default doesn’t help either. It seems like it almost tries to make it hard to connect with people you know.