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 feel like certain users are echoing others in terms of the “oh it’s too hard/complicated” - I don’t know, imo not really just sign up, subscribe to your mags of interest which will pull across the fediverse and engage (up/down/comment) as much as you like lol… really not that hard but I guess change is hard for people (but then it’s not really much a seismic change? I don’t know - I guess I like trying new things).