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?
The only real issue I have is that searching for communities I know exist on other instances often fails, and opening them in their home instances doesn’t offer a subscribe button to my host instance.
With you on that one. Some small youtuber I have followed for years setup over on lemmy.world. I know it exists, but searching on kbin, no matter what I try, doesn’t yield it to me. Unless it hits the frontpage or I am accidentally looking at the new feed the same moment the guy posts there, I won’t really have a way to subscribe. Also don’t really want to wrangle multiple accounts.
For Lemmy, if nobody has subscribed to a community locally, you need to search
https://instance.social/c/whateverto get!whatever@instance.social. Once someone subscribes locally, searching!whatever@instance.socialworks.It’s pretty unintuitive, especially when Kbin lets you search
@whatever@instance.socialeven if that community isn’t on your instance yet.