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?
Edit: I do think terminology is a bit of an issue. I can tell a lot of people don’t understand “instance” vs. “community” at first. “Magazine” is the biggest offender here. That’s a very unintuitive term.
Fear and an unwillingness to try new things.
For example, some of the complaints that people had about Mastodon early on were just odd to me. They made such a big deal out of “you have to pick a server, no one understands that” or nitpicking UI interfaces between Mastodon and twt. They didn’t have logical arguments IMHO it was them just not being happy about change and not being honest about that.
Saying “I don’t want to deal with different servers within a single website” is illogical? Seems entirely logical to me. Anyone used to Reddit is going to be turned off to the whole messy fediverse thing. Me included. Legitimately, it evokes feelings of the dead on arrival Metaverse.
People want simplicity. We’re decades past the days of BBS boards.
It’s not a single website. And what’s with all the hate I see around here about BBS boards? BBS boards were great. I just want someone to loop me in about the hate. I just think with the fediverse we’re seeing a rise of a model that brings the best things about BBS boards to more modern web technologies