For a sub that’s supposed to promote Reddit alternatives, there sure is a lot of pessimism on there. I see so many people dismissing Lemmy and kbin already for being too inaccessible, the UI is clunky, it’s hard to pick up etc and saying these sites will never take off. But why? Of course a platform in its infancy will have hurdles to overcome, and it takes time for devs to implement all the QOL features to make the site more intuitive. And when I see people trying to explain how Lemmy works, people just respond “Too complicated, I’m not reading all that etc.”
Do people expect a fully functional Reddit clone with all the same features to conveniently exist somewhere they can hop to? Do people not realise that Reddit itself was just as confusing when users migrated from Digg all those years ago? Do they not realise sites take time to mature?
RedditAlternatives is the only subreddit I still use because I want to help people make the jump, but it’s kinda disheartening seeing the attitudes there. Anyone has a more optimistic take on this?
What these people are really saying is that it’s not really bad enough on Reddit for them to migrate.
And you know what? Fair enough, that’s a perfectly valid position to take, and we should respect that descision. Not everyone sees a third party app as all that necessary, and many are happy to scroll through promoted posts. It’s not for other people to decide how you get to enjoy a product, after all.
Of course, many of us who have left have clued in that Reddit is not the product, Reddit is a cage to hold the product: Redditors; that the user experience on Reddit will only continue to decline as it inevitably does with the enshitification business model. Meanwhile Lemmy will continue to improve.
You can’t save people from themselves. Some people are so entrenched they will stay to the bitter end. The cost benefit of jumping ship from one platform to another is going to be different for everyone, it’s going to change as Reddit pushes monetisation and community projects focus on features to attract users, and you have to accept that.
Reddit is filled with people who think Reddit is the only place that can do reddit things. They are too young to remember forums or any other alternative. Not to mention general computer literacy has gone down in the last decade since every major site has built in tons of simplicity/convenience.
Fair, but I find it so strange that these people would be in a sub called RedditAlternatives but go “nope, nope, nah, nuh-uh” at every alternative presented just because the alternative isn’t exactly the same as Reddit, without even giving them a chance. Lemmy isn’t even that complicated, I’ve supported several users through the jump by answering their questions on the process in DMs, and so far all of them eventually got it after some explanation. But the rest of the commenters act like you need to open a backend console and run 50 lines of code just to create an account. I’m just… saddened, honestly.
Fair, but I find it so strange that these people would be in a sub called RedditAlternatives but go “nope, nope, nah, nuh-uh” at every alternative presented just because the alternative isn’t exactly the same as Reddit,
Loud and helplessly negative users bitching endlessly instead of doing anything to make things better? In my internet???
I just joined Lemmy 2 days ago and heard about it last week because of all the protest. I don’t find it unintuitive at all, but I can understand the confusion.
Most people want something simple. Going on Reddit all one needs to do (nowadays) is login -> login with <service_name> and boom that person just made an account.
On Lemmy you have to pick an instance -> choose which instance you want to join (which can be hard for some people or they can find it unintuitive) -> go to register and create an account (and sometimes wait for it to be accepted, or even answer questions before that. Although there are instances that don’t need all this stuff, the amount of choices can make it difficult). It might not look hard, but to someone that wants something simple and easy is probably not very good of an experience.
That’s what turned me off from Lemmy. I had no clue what I was doing to begin with, then I tried to register for an instance, and the sign up button just kept spinning forever. So I tried another instance. It wanted me to type out why I wanted to join and answer some questions. Like, what? I’m not jumping through hoops to use your service. Plus, as far as I’m aware, your username you register with on one instance doesn’t follow you into other instances. It makes zero sense to me.
It’s Like signing up for a gmail account. You can email yahoo accounts, but your username won’t work to log into yahoo.
I went though the same issues as you. I was able to get a lemmy account and a kbin, and fedia account. Now kbin has enable federation, and the feed is muchhhhh more active. The traffic to the sites have slowed down a bit and they have mostly scaled up their servers. Works great for me now.
It’s not quite that simple though. It would be like if Yahoo email users weren’t able to see emails from GMail users in some cases. Like beehaw people can’t see posts from us lemmy.world users.
