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.
What is this about having to copy and paste a link to find subscriptions from other instances? I literally just pull up the community browser and set it to “all” and then search.