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?
Edit: I do think terminology is a bit of an issue. I can tell a lot of people don’t understand “instance” vs. “community” at first. “Magazine” is the biggest offender here. That’s a very unintuitive term.
I can’t help but think that people who describe the Fediverse as complicated joined reddit after the redesign…
Kbin is exactly like an old, stripped down version of old.reddit.
In kbins case you actually have a responsive admin and can actually find devs on here working on new features and tweaks (hey there!)
Super happy with how kbin has been going so far
I think this is also the cause of the squabbles.io Vs kbin/Lemmy split. Squabbles is like new Reddit, kbin is like old Reddit. And people like what they know
This last sentence is the crux of the matter. People don’t like change, but quickly forget that they spent time learning the site that they’re so familiar with.