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 Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to that community on your instance you have to copy the entire URL. E.g. you need to search for
https://instance.social/c/sub
in order to find !sub@instance.social.Once one person on your instance searches for it, then you can find it by searching !sub@instance.social.
I don’t know why Lemmy works like that. Kbin doesn’t have the problem; you can find things by searching
@sub@instance.social
no matter what.