Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt.
Is Lemmy buggy as heck? Absolutely.
But I don’t think that really justifies a lot of the comments I’m seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that it’s hard to figure out. The front page feed and sort options are very similar to Reddit. Searching for same-instance communities is not too difficult. Posting, commenting, and voting are all quite intuitive. What’s the problem?
I think part of the issue is trying to add subs from other instances.
That is an issue for small instances, but not if they join a big instance.
This is solvable in code, maybe with an external service that provides a list of all
subs over all instances.
It needs to be solved in code + ui, and ideally in the default Kbin/Lemmy interfaces, so that every new user’s experience is the best it can be.
At the end of the day it’s all about friction, the less of it the better.