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?
Yeah. Really, new admins should understand that they should be seeding their new instance, but the last couple of weeks have been… Kinda nuts? So, this won’t really be an issue for most users long term. It’ll be a thing for admins on small or niche sites that want to ensure they’re discoverable and that their users can access the best communities.