Yes, and I think Reddit has struggled to gain the same number of users as other social media platforms - their UI is more challenging for a lot of people, and the experience of trying to find communities can be frustrating and confusing. It’s a good point, but I still found it fairly easy to find the main subreddit for a given community based on the activity going on. My point about fractured instances is that you don’t have something like two /c/Gaming communities that don’t overlap in users at all due to defederation. On Reddit a user is on a single instance with all the communities in one place. On Lemmy you have to find not just the community but also the instance that community is on (or an instance that federates with the instance the community is on). All of these extra steps are even more complicated, and remember Reddit’s interface was already confusing for lots of people.

Not everyone has the same situation.

Sure, some people have every opportunity to research and learn about alternatives, but the number of those people are much fewer than the number of people busy raising kids, holding down jobs, etc. This idea that users are mostly idiots who are addicted to the algorithm is highly reductive, it actually adopts the cynical mindset of the capitalists trying to manipulate people (that users are just marks, idiots to be exploited, deserving of their exploitation). It’s honestly surprising to see how much hatred people have for the average user here, considering to my mind Lemmy is meant to be a non-profit, community-driven alternative to corporate apps like Reddit. You would think that mindset would come with some understanding that the users are the victims and that blaming them misses the point. Lemmy is not a perfect alternative to Reddit, as I made my point above, so blaming the users feels a bit delusional to me, and honestly quite convenient to the desires of the oligarchs, which is to ignore social, economic, and otherwise structural inequalities and manipulations and instead focus on the failings of individuals (in this case users) to not exceed their circumstances.

I think my mom would find IRC and usenet very difficult to get into using, for example. Being old doesn’t mean it’s accessible or understandable to people. Even worse, the young people (like “Gen Z”, as much as I hate to use generational thinking) seem to be less tech-literate than Gen Y, so lots of the relevant user base are not going to navigate these things even if they seem simple to a lot of us. Just the curse of expertise I guess (where you forget what it was like before you knew things, how intimidating it all was, etc.).

yes, the bug is a feature in some sense, but it’s still also a bug 😅

Do you know how big Lemmy is compared to Mastodon? I actually know much less about Mastodon, I just never could use anything like Twitter, trying to fit my thoughts into so few characters was futile (and yeah, maybe that’s a me problem, but still). Anyway, just completely speculating that if Lemmy is newer and smaller it might not have had the same opportunity to develop the same animosities and fractures, but at this point I’m literally making up fictions.

Maybe there should be a library of all the communities that have matching names and goals, so that an app can present them as one group with all the posts and comments merged as if it was just the one community.

Not sure people want to see a merge between !politics@lemmy.world and !usa@lemmy.ml

A semi-unified view is sorta what you get when instances are federated with one another, not that communities with the same name get unified but at least both communities’ posts show up in one place. But the problem is even if you solve those problems, you still have instances that will defederate over differences in moderation policies and politics, etc. - ultimately a given set of instances will still always be a fractured subset of all the Lemmy instances. Maybe with enough people in a set of instances this wouldn’t be a problem, but you have to find a way to get that many people to show up and stick around, and you have to keep those instances playing nice with one another and not falling apart like Mastodon instances did when a huge number of people migrated. People bring drama and overwhelm these smaller communities which are maintained by volunteers running servers and moderating. Ultimately what you see is that people just quit, and there is no stability - and then users leave and don’t come back.

It’s just not a model for gaining and retaining users, tbh.

sure, I can understand that concern, but I think there are plenty of users who might need better UI/UX for so many different reasons (thinking of disabilities like dyslexia, etc.) that have nothing to do with the quality of the content they would bring.

My point is that users bring content and activity, and that is why people ultimately want to join and stick around in an online community. Not every person who finds the Fediverse confusing is “not good enough” - I just hard disagree with you, there are plenty of good people with useful and entertaining things to contribute who would be more likely to if there weren’t barriers. Regardless, this attitude is exactly what I think undermines the Fediverse, it’s arrogant and alienating. Lemmy shouldn’t be just for the technologically privileged, websites in general should be accessible to people of all kinds and perhaps online communities especially. What’s the point of a community-built social media alternative if we reject most humans who would make up that community?