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?
I suspect in the next 6 months or so Lemmy is going to see a bunch of UI improvements as more open source devs learn about the project. It’s similar to the UI of Reddit 7-8 years ago, but I’m in the minority of remembering what Reddit was before it became https://old.
It feels unrealistic to expect a small platform that blew up, not ready to scale to be as polished as something built by a large paid organization right of the bat.