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.
That's funny because I don't have a masters degree in computer science and this wasn't that fucking hard.
Your friend asks what "the product" is, which screams a fundamental misunderstanding of the service and Free Open Source Software in general.
He complains about the front page post about the servers. It's very possible your friend knows how to program, but knows nothing about networking and systems administration, which, surprise, are actually entirely different things while being technically connected at the hip.
These things show a misunderstanding from the get-go, and an unwillingness to view it through any lens other than a business "what is the product, how will it make money" lens. The entire reason individual instances are slow is because they don't have millions of servers in the backend. These are small-time developers doing the best they can with the tools they have available, which isn't much. The instances are being hammered by post-reddit traffic, and that's slowing things down considerably. Anyone from the "old" internet realizes this is a reality of having a website. I remember the days when sites would get "Slashdotted" and go down simply from traffic from readers from Slashdot. This is no different.
If your friend doesn't want to join a community, that's fine. He can stay in the Vulture Capital lane, that's not our business.