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.
This space also just isn’t mature enough for a lot of people. The federated nature of things makes young sites and young communities, uh, confusing for some. That really fades away when the influx stabalizes and growth curves become shallow and predictable.
It’ll grow, and develop its own culture, and become a reliable and solid alternative to Reddit. Right now, it’s both a gamble for people, and also somewhere they can view as “stealing” something from them.
Agreed. While I am more favourable to platforms like Lemmy and Kbin on a more or less ideological level (I hate how the internet is essentially five companies in a trench coat at this point, all using user generated content and data for their own profits), Reddit as an experience isn’t terrible enough for me to throw it away yet (or at least, these sites can’t replicate what I’m looking for well enough to make me commit to jumping ship just yet).
I’m glad these platforms are getting a lot more attention, I’m glad to see them grow and mature (both in terms of userbase, but as well as functionality), and I want them to succeed. However, once the dust from the blackout has settled (most of the subs I normally visited are still private, which I fully support), I will probably jump back to Reddit until the restless march towards enshitification strikes once again, and I leave the platform more or less for good (with these platforms at the top of the list of alternatives for me to return to).
I think it’s also a fear of the unknown, kind of like those who are hesitant to move from Windows to Linux. They would rather tolerate garbage because it’s familiar garbage.
Cynicism? On Reddit!?
In seriousness, I think it’s a mix of things. There’s survivorship bias–some number of Lemmy posters (me, for example) have left, never to return. So we’re not in r/RedditAlternatives speaking in favor of Lemmy. Some of it’s frustration over this whole situation. It is very unfortunate things went down this way. And there’s legitimate criticism too. Lemmy’s got quite a bit growing and maturing to do before it could get anywhere near the size and breadth of Reddit.
But it’s also important to realize Lemmy is not going to be a clone of Reddit. It’s not trying to and it wouldn’t succeed if it did. No one thing is going to replace Reddit for everybody. Personally, I think that’s a big plus. There’s value in a smaller community. I like that Lemmy is decentralized by design but there also needs to be more diversity on the Internet in general. Some communities will be better served by spinning up their own message boards, going to different sites and experimenting with different formats. Quite a few are going to stay on Reddit and probably thrive for years to come. And that’s fantastic, that’s what we should’ve been doing all along.
Singular, monolithic solutions are the real problem, imo.
that subreddit naturally has a pessimistic tone because they’re all sick of reddit, but haven’t felt that the alternatives presented are worth switching to. Lemmy has been posted on there a few times, and I myself was dismissive of it (and still now I do not use lemmy). kbin had what I wanted though, so I commented such on that subreddit and now here I am.
different people have different needs. sometimes, the alternative just isn’t active enough to really be worth switching to (no one else is joining you). other times the ui might be clunky or weird or not something you like. the fediverse concept is a bit difficult for non-technical people. Though I think kbin’s federation downtime kinda helped mitigate that for a lot of us (and there was a lot of educating here on kbin about what that was all about). for kbin you just join kbin. but lemmy it’s a bit daunting with all the instances.
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^
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.
Ain’t this the truth? I am more than happy to be on this platform over reddit and really apparently it’s too much work to learn something, figuring stuff out and learning the pathways is all the fun to me.
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???
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.
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?
@Awhiskeydrunker Or someone spins up a server/instance has the same, or worse, hissy fit that mods and reddit is having now and turns it off entirely. lemmy and mastodon have been around for a long time and the ui is still…weird (being nice) ie clunky af. with a ton of rube goldberg round about ways to log in to do w/e, and saturated with technobabble. Look at beehaw. A bunch of redditors just wanting a new home as bystanders of a tempertantrum mods and spez are having. Showed up, most just perfectly nice people I guess. and not a day latter beehaw is rejecting new users and doubled down on technobable and pasted their magnum carta long rambling philosophical stuff. making excuses to why. Having something that can seemlessly have a smart automatic way where spawns mirrors. So that it’s more likely to have uptime, maybe a little like what kazza could do back in the day. That’d be cool af. But right now it’s on temperamental socially maladjusted people to do that manually. Assuming they have more than one computer, and assuming it runs linux. Correct me that i’m wrong kbin and lemmy don’t have simple .exes for lemmy and kbin.
That means its even more likely to turn into a complete debacle if/when people don’t want to be cordial and politic,
What are people promoting right now if not Lemmy?
Some are promoting tilde or other centralised solutions that will have the same issue of Reddit sooner or later
I feel like I need to type out a full thesis paper in order to fit in with the type over on Tildes.
These are legitimate complaints. Sure the issues raised about the platform are an artifact of it being in its infancy but you can’t expect the average person to deal with those issues. The fediverse and decentralization in general as a concept is hard to grasp in a world where people are used to centralized applications and where such applications, let’s face it, are simpler.
There’s a lot that needs to be done before Lemmy can become truly viable. Better moderation tools are needed or more instances will defederate from one another. The UI could be more intuitive. The algorithm that lists posts on the front page needs to push more recent posts to the top. It’ll get there eventually.
