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 agree, and that is part of the cognitive dissonance between enjoying reddit for what it provided and wanting to switch to an alternative. However, if one is searching for a reddit alternative and will not switch to anything exactly like it, why should one even be looking for an alternative?