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 think the implication is from the perspective of a long-time reddit user. I’ve already gotten used to posting “articles” in “magazines” and the nomenclature has clicked a little, but I certainly was pretty confused about it for a day coming hot off of reddit. For example, something like “community” and “post” could have been more fool-proof, albeit less interesting and unique.