I'm just as old as he is, maybe only a few years younger. I started to learn computers on a Commodore VIC 20 and 64, used tape drives for storage. I entered into BBS near the end of its popularity, however I used chat boards, AOL, and Geocities...old forums as well. I also moderated a forum for a few years on a Star Wars fan site before the admin shut it down and I moved to Reddit.
I have a lot of experience navigating forums as well...Fediverse sometimes takes a little bit more digging to find what you want. The point I was also trying to make is that these platforms are also in their infancy, their alpha programming state. So things will change, the platform will develop. This kind of thing isn't built in a day, yet IMHO it's so much nicer not having ads forced down my throat on desktop every five posts.
If this person doesn't like the experience here, then there's nothing saying he can't go back to Reddit.