overall Lemmy is pretty good. Better than I expected tbh.
The communities are smaller, which feels more old-school, and it feels friendlier and more accepting. On reddit if you bought up nu-metal in the metal subreddit you'd be downvoted and harassed, here I saw someone bring up nu-metal in a metal community and people were super accepting of it. However, because of the smaller population, the more niche interests don't have a community, or if they do, there's basically no content.
The federation thing takes a second to 'get' and with it, comes problems of discoverability, but we have browse.feddit.de to help with that. The upside to the fediverse is the fact the users are in control of the platform instead of a for-profit organization make me very happy, I no longer scroll with shame, I scroll with pride.
There are pros and cons to Lemmy but the biggest cons are related to the relatively low number of users which will grow with time (I hope). Overall I'm enjoying it so far and I really hope more reddit communities make the switch
I'm curious what difficulties you encountered, I signed up at beehaw where i had to write a response to why i wanted to join, but even then my account was manually reviewed by a human and when i checked an hour later, I was signed up.
Other communities don't have such rules. I managed to create an alt account on another server and i was signed up immediately, equally as fast as reddit.