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?
Atm, Lemmy isn’t nearly as fancily featured or polished on the surface that Reddit or other social medias are. A small subset of us enjoy the simpler and cleaner experience of baby internet things, despite all the accompanying bugs and technical gremlins. The average internet user, however, wants to have their content delivered with the prettiest packaging and a minimum of effort. Most people also don’t usually want to put in the work to learn a new way to do things.