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?
“All” shows every community/magazine that at least one person on your instance has subscribed to.
The different sort options sort then differently, of course.
I see, thank you! This makes the choice of instance when signing up more significant than I thought.
Yep, places with more people will have a wider range of communities in their “all” feed.
That said, the barrier to making an account isn’t too high. My first account was on Lemmy.ml back in 2020, shortly after Lemmy was created (I never stuck around and left pretty quickly).
Last month I realized I don’t trust Lemmy.ml, so I joined Beehaw.org.
Then I thought Beehaw.org was a little overzealous at times, so I came here to Kbin.social.
I’ve largely stuck to Kbin because I really like how it looks and feels, but I did make accounts on Lemmy.world, fedia.io, and sh.itjust.works as backups in case Kbin goes down.