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?
Agreed. It still is a pain to follow subs on other instances, especially within Jeroba. I know you’re supposed to copy the !sub@instance into the search field, but it never comes up.
Kbin doesn’t presently auto-hyperlink the !sub@instance text.
I expect that it will in the future.
It will in the next update. See https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/317
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.
You don’t need to do that if that community is already federating with your instance. If its not, it might take a little while for the federation to actually start after you make the search (based on the server infrastructure of your instance and the remaining queue). Try searching again after a bit and it should be there. These quriks should be solved as instances become more stable, and Lemmy/kbin gets further developed.