I you want a site for hackers, you can just write it in your own lisp dialect (; but if you want a social network you have to make it much, much easier. Not sure the decentralizers understand just how critical that is.
Also users, aside from a few loud ones, really do want at least some minimal moderation.
You have to first pick a server to join, then join that server. Once in, you're typically presented with local server content only. To see federated content, you have to select "All". Same story with looking at communities. Local first, All by selection only.
You then have problems with the style of Federation. If I create a community one Lemmy instance called tech then you create the tech community on another, we now have two tech communities separate from each other. Given your default community view is local, this presents a problem. You've already got a lemmy.ml technology community along with a beehaw.org technology community. It can quickly spiral into a mess of unintentional duplication.
And to be honest I have no idea if it will come back....I guess this is the risk of choosing instances.
I considered buying a domain and setting up my own instance..If for no other reason than to be in control of the account I use for this reason (of course the domain i priced has been picked up since it seems the migration is happening and i missed the boat.)
On my instance at least, you can click Communities and just browse the list and subscribe to whichever you want.
The other issue with federation is picking an instance. There needs to be more initial connection between instances. By this I mean it needs to be much easier to subscribe to a community on another instance. Right now you have to copy paste parts of the URL into your instances url.
Some sort of shared authentication across the fediverse that identified your instance would enable something like this.