I think that ease of use is the biggest hurdle at the moment. While yeah Mastodon has grown it’s also improved quite a bit. The onboarding is much more streamlined versus six months ago.

Those barriers are getting better but are still there for Lemmy. Apps are starting to come which is fantastic but the users need to want to engage with the platform. Streamlined sign up, improved features and UI improvements will need to continue to evolve in order to grow the user base.

I think that to protect creators they either need to be transparent about all content used to train the AI (highly unlikely) or have a disclaimer of liability, wherein if original content has been used is training of AI then the Original Content creator who have standing for legal action.

The only other alternative would be to insure that the AI specifically avoid copyright or trademarked content going back to a certain date.