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?
Being pretty new to Lenny, I didn’t find joining hard. Granted I work in IT and technology is my passion and hobby. The biggest thing for me was choosing an instance I wanted to be in long term, that didn’t seem like it was gonna isolate itself from everyone else through defederation (Eg. Beehaw). I like Lenny, especially the people so far, and using the Mlem app it’s a pretty smooth experience, I think federation overall is a new scary concept for regular people.