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.
I mean it took me years to find different community's on reddit.