I told somebody I know who knew about Reddit's API changes about Lemmy. He has a master's degree in Computer Science and works as a software engineer. But then, he told me that it's too confusing to get into, even for someone like him. This is great feedback and I hope that these issues will be fixed in the coming months.
I think your friend just doesn't want to put in 5 minutes of effort. And honestly, that's fine. I think the average reddittor has been kind of trending that way for a while, and I wish him the best of luck hanging out with people who can't be assed to put in 5 minutes to figure anything out. I might be wrong, but especially for technical content I think the mean will drop much further on reddit.
It's maybe 5 minutes of effort to create an account, but it's another 5 minutes of effort to log in, and then 15+ minutes of effort to find your favorite communities. I'm willing to take that effort, but this shows how Lemmy could improve.
Subscribing to communities is kind of a pain in the ass if you aren't looking for anything specifically. I went page by page, because I have a problem - but damn, can we get some sort of sorting, at least alphabetically? I'm sure I missed some communities because there'd be some shifting/refreshing between me subbing to something and then moving on to the next page. I'd also love for a tick box that you could toggle "don't show subscribed" when browsing to make finding newer communities and instances easier. Locally, it's much more manageable, but once you go over to All...
I mean it took me years to find different community's on reddit.