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?
I think the question is more “how many of these hurdles can be overcome, and how many are a fundamental flaw in how Lemmy was created?”. Decentralization is good for many things, but it has many drawbacks.
And well, people want to find a Reddit alternative, but Lemmy is just not there yet. People will obviously get disheartened when they have to jump through a bunch of hoops just to find the community they wanted, only for them to then find it empty with only a few posts from 2 years ago.
And honestly, the stock Reddit app may be a shitshow, but it’s certainly way better than the Jerboa alpha. I think most people aren’t as affected by the change, and are doing the protest more out of principle than anything else. Obviously the lack of mod tools will affect everybody, but I think that issue is much more nebulous and we don’t know how bad it’ll actually be yet. All of that makes it way harder for people to commit to the switch.
^and yes, if it wasn’t obvious, I’m people^