For me, federation sounds simple in theory. In practice it’s not for end users. Forcing an instance to discover a new, unfedeated community is a pain in the ass, let alone finding that community in the first place. All these little services (e.g. listing all instances/communities) are scattered and you kind of just have to learn as you go.

The average user just wants a nice search - that searches through “all” of Lemmy - something that is obviously hard or even impossible (or even not desirable to all users)

I think the above commenter is misunderstanding that the user is also federated. All of these concepts are hard to grasp but will eventually sink in I hope.