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?
The main thing for me is that i dislike the federation. Also the UI is a bit ugly but that’s easily fixable
Do you dislike the federation or the implementation thereof? I think for me and many others, it’s the latter. Federation is exactly what we need to ensure we don’t create another Reddit. But it’s implemented so badly that it’s turning people away. Thankfully I think it can be fixed easily.
Discoverability is a huge issue right now. Forcing people to use hard-to-find submenus to manually search for communities on other instances using, effectively, commands (!community@instance.TLD) is crazy.
Another issue is account migration. I understand this is a high priority for the Lemmy devs.
Honestly, if Apollo just pointed at all these federated servers right now, I’d be pretty happy.
Discoverability is always a problem when in a period of new instances spinning up. There are some solvable issues around community discovery once federation had been established, but scaling up periods are just janky due to the lack of a central source of truth.
Things will get go much smoother once it’s clear that we’re not just all going to go back to Reddit. Periods of organic growth are really nice.
But yeah, the UI on both Lemmy and kbin need work
Aside from the adjustment to not having centralizated single points of entry for popular topics, and the early growing pains being experienced right now… what’s not to like about federation? Isn’t that what ensures we won’t fall into the same trap down the road where user/moderator benefit is deprioritized for the sake of commercialization?