totally crushed under the weight of FOMO.

Wouldn’t they have FOMO by not following /r/Gaming, /r/Games, /r/Videogames, etc. as well?

And the design language of the space communicates to them that they don’t need one.

They don’t really need one. They can just open https://vger.app/ , see that it’s quite similar to what Apollo used to be, then have a look around and see if they like it. They don’t need to understand federation to lurk. They don’t need to understand federation to install an app.

If they click on the vote or comment buttons, Voyager suggests them to register an account on Lemm.ee. Again, no need to understand what federation is to get it running.