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.
I was just thinking that. Subreddit is a dumb made up word that a corportation invented. Community and magazine are descriptors. Sublemmy or subbin are just people trying to map experiences from on platform to another, and are understandable, but I’d personally prefer to see us call them communities and magazines in the long term.
Bottom line. Subreddit. Dumb word. If you were able to learn that, you can learn “magazine”