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?
For me, I can easily pick up on design language through inference and just exploring UIs, but I realized that most people don’t have that skill. It took me only a few seconds to understand the Lemmy UI and the other third party clients’ UIs. Kind of interesting