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?
It’s for Mastodon compatibility. Articles are like Reddit posts and microblogs are like tweets. You can post either from Kbin. Your articles will show up as community posts on Lemmy, and your microblogs will show up as toots on Mastodon.