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?
When twitter was starting to fuck up and people were moving to mastodon someone asked how to find followers. I replied with the standard “hang out on the federated feed for a while and add people”. He replied outright asking how to buy followers/influence.
So yeah.