In other places on around the web, (chiefly /r/RedditAlternatives) whenever Lemmy is brought up, invariably I see the exact same complaints from brand new accounts.
Lemmy is too complicated, it wont gain traction, can’t figure out how to use it, can’t log in, etc.
Now, I’m definitely more tech savvy than the average redditor, but I just don’t see the complaints. You can go to any Lemmy site, instantly start doomscrolling with a familiar UI, and sign up on all the instances I’ve tried has been frankly more simple than making a new reddit account. The only real complaint I have is the generally smaller volume of users and posts.
My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.
Ideally, the first link someone sees when googling Lemmy would be a global feed on a fairly generic instance, with a basic tagline akin to ‘front page of the internet.’ End users don’t need to care about the technical details, at least not until they’re interested in the platform.
So is this “Lemmy is too confusing” sentiment even real? And if not, what motive would there be to astroturf this?
If it is a real issue affecting would-be users, how can we address it?
Reddit at this point a psyop for multiple different countries, political parties, celebrities, influenzars and such. US, Israel, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and others have Internet task force to push propaganda and limit negative PR.
Votes aren’t public in reddit and is a great cover for hiding any coordinated influence. Keep creating new accounts, make it seem natural by posting on random subs, use old accounts for posts/comments and new accounts for votes. To an unsuspecting user, nothing seems out of ordinary.
On ActivityPub all votes are public and manipulation can be detected or analyzed now or in future. Instance admins could check this and see a pattern. And there are many many many instances, so any one might run into something.
Also mod logs are public in lemmy, unlike reddit. Censorship from mods and admins are already a constant cause for drama but makes it a lot more transparent for the community.
So it’s less influential. So, they try to dissuade people from making Lemmy and Mastodon less interesting.
I’m not saying it’s not possible here, but it’s too early and needs a lot more work than reddit. People already do not interact with users from instances they dislike. You already see some patterns in how users of instance behave and avoid them.
I think its surviorship bias: the people who understand lemmy are on lemmy, not reddit.
Most of us are on both, because Lemmy still isn’t big enough
I’m on both to evangelise lemmy.
You’re doing the lords work.
Stupid people thinking little Lemmy is too complicated to use is a feature not a bug. If someone can’t figure out how to use the Lemmy interface why would we even want them here?
We got a glimpse of what a true exodus could look like, and I’m with you. As much as I’d love to see Reddit collapse from its own shittiness, for Lemmy’s sake I’d rather see a trickle who have a chance to learn manners and leave their vitriol behind.
Not saying Lemmy’s perfect. I’m not saying I’m perfect: I have bad days and make asshole responses, too. But they get swallowed, or I get a reasonable response and I apologize. In the main, the real, consistent excuses for human beings who resist the opportunity to become better people tend to join instances like Hexbear, and can be blocked en mass.
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Nah gatekeeping is good. I agree this place and the fediverse in general are massive echo chambers and that’s bad, but the more of the general public that gets on a platform the worse it gets. Obviously you can’t have an IQ filter or a test to get on, so a janky hard to use interface is good enough to scare away Facebook drones and brainrot zombies.
Agree. Some people are just too dumb to own a computer. Giving them access to internet is like giving a Kalashnikov to a monkey.
If the fediverse has any chance at properly succeeding it must create a “front page” for each alternative. Lemmy for reddit for example. There is no reason why all of lemmy can’t have a front page like old.lemmy.world with each community/platform on lemmy being connected and allowing for ease of access unlike what it is currently where you need a different account for every single Lemmy site
you need a different account for every single Lemmy site
What are you talking about? You are using a lemmy.world account to comment in a lemmy.ml community right now.
Your comment seems to misunderstand federation and the function of activitypub. Lemmy does have an All front page that is the front page of All Lemmy servers that your instance knows about and hasn’t defederated with.
You don’t need an account for each instance, you just post on your local instances copy of the community/post and your post shows up on all other Lemmy servers that you instance knows about.
You may have inadvertently made your own point, that it isn’t intuitive for newcomers but a single front page/account totally defeats the purpose of decentralized social media.
You have described BlueSky which is distributed but not decentralized and will enshittify the same as Reddit and twitter and the only benefit to ATProto is some other public benefit corp could potentially host a copy of the network in its place until that business decides to enshittify of course
Yes. Of course the big platforms actively seek to undermine competitors. There’s billions of dollars at stake. Something that really convinced me was reading about how Facebook ran VPN services to spy on traffic so they could spot budding competitor platforms.
We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular. Something I’m not convinced they ever stopped doing. I believe reddit corporate still bots their own site for whatever purpose they require in the moment. I absolutely believe they troll their own site. Remember spez is the guy who live edits the production database.
I used facebook way too much and the thing that got me to finally delete my account in 2011 was I had made a post about discovering diaspora and linking my account. Hung out with a friend a month or two later and he loaded up my facebook profile and could see every post I had ever made except the one about a federated facebook alternative.
Veering a little off-topic now, but facebook contacts being my irl friends made that feel so dangerous to me. If half my friends have opinion A and the other half opinion B, then if one opinion is entirely censored but I still see everything posted matching the approved opinion, that will have an enormous sway over how my worldview develops, in a way different from seeing strangers agreeing on those same things.
We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular.
That’s not quite it. The founders made a few of throwaway accounts and posted a bunch of links that exemplified what they wanted people to post. It was fake activity, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t automated. It was maybe 50 posts and I don’t think it was a bad thing to do.
I’m probably the least tech savvy person on Lemmy. If my dumb ass can figure it out, the subset of Reddit’s population who we’d actually want in Lemmy’s community should have no problem.
That said, onboarding could have been better, and you’re right about the potential hangups: “fediverse” sounds like some kind of federal government function like a hub website that links to all the different .gov agencies, and “Lemmy” sounds like a cartoon character. Choosing an instance was more stressful than it probably should have been; ultimately went with .world by blindly following the advice of a YouTube video, but on day 1 I was pretty oblivious to the extremist shit that’s associated with instances like .ml and had no clue what ‘tankie’ even meant.
That was two years ago though - no idea if that reflects what getting started is like today.
And again, that’s all coming from a relatively tech-dumbass, so I’d imagine it’s probably smoother for people less prone to starting a fire when they turn their computer turns on.
Edit: sorry to anyone who had to read that before the edit… when I’m tired I have an annoying tendency to think a word as I’m typing and then just skip to the next one. And I’m tired all the fucking time, so my posts have a lot of holes Q_Q
I have no idea what the instances even are, I didn’t realize it mattered, I just picked one at random. I still have no idea what they are or why it matters
If you’re interested, the short version is that instances (A.K.A servers) are run by different people in different places. A reason to move instances might be:
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My admin, the owner of the instance, has been doing things I heavily disagree with (bans, blocks, etc)
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I don’t agree with the rules on my instance.
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The instance is run in a country which criminalizes something that I care about, and so has to ban discussion of that thing (piracy, porn, etc).
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I want to run a community on a specific instance for whatever reason, and so need an account there
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And it’s okay! No need to understand those at first
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Most of the negative answers on /r/RedditAlternatives are either botted or bad faith.
!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com to see a few examples
I have zero tech skills and I’m here I do think the emails back and forth to get my original log in was obnoxious, it literally took days, and I have no idea how to start communities, I have no idea what the “federation” or “fediverse” is, I don’t understand “instances” and I really do miss Reddit for how easy all those things are but I figure eventually I’ll get it and this will feel like home. If all you want to do is make an account to scroll it’s pretty easy but I do agree everything else is hard/obnoxious and it will definitely slow down growth. That said I was on reddit since almost the beginning and growing quickly only came in the past several years and it really destroyed the site, so growing slowly isn’t inherently a bad thing. I do wish there was simple videos to watch on things like how to make a community though
I came to Lemmy after being permabanned on Reddit, and I didn’t have any problem signing up, logging in, or using it.
I also miss the smaller crowds, but I don’t miss the pages of puns, shitposts, trolls, 4Chan refugees, contrarians, novelty accounts, bots, Russian Propaganda Farmers, etc. I do miss the active forums for some of my favorite subjects, like guitars. The few forums that exist are very quiet, with posts every few days, weeks or even months, instead of constantly, like Reddit.
I find it much better for politics, if for no other reason that we can talk openly without getting suspended or banned.
For sure, people who play guitar (and my other big hobbyi trail riding) typically won’t be this privacy focussed, so I need to go back to Reddit if I want discussion on that outside of real life. There’s other website forums for those at least.
I miss the days when reddit was full of tech-minded people (back when they had to compete with Digg). These days it’s full of normies, and normies tend to be fucking idiots. Just look at any YouTube comment section.
As the saying goes, the average person isn’t very smart, and by definition half of the population is even less savvy.
I don’t think Lemmy is too confusing to use but I do think it’s poorly explained. Most people new to a server are only looking at two things:
- Overall content on the front page and how effective its filtering is.
- A topic specific community they are interested in.
But when they begin see the content can be vastly different from server to server and the topics they care about can be split into many communities on different servers they aren’t sure how to access what they want and lose interest.
Really? When I have posted comments on /r/RedditAlternatives about Lemmy being too complicated and that it won’t gain traction, I’ve been getting downvotes. Despite saying I use it.
Concepts like federation and instances are definitely part of the problem. Reddit is quite easy to understand. Make an account on the website (or not), go to /r/all or type in /r/whatever, and away you go. Lemmy is not that easy to understand. Many people that could be interested in Lemmy don’t have any idea what the different instances are or which they should use, so they just give up.
Lemmy doesn’t need to take off like reddit did, but those touting it as the next big thing are being very optimistic. The barrier to understanding is just too high.
People just install Voyager and use it just fine. Some of them don’t even know what instances they’re on
This is my point when it comes to federation stuff. You don’t need to understand it at all to use Lemmy. Join and start scrolling just like you would on reddit
That is probably the right way to get people started, assuming they want to do their browsing on their phone. The barrier to entry for those who just download Voyager is so low that it might help make up for a lack of understanding about other features. Then they just have to get over there not being an active community for everything under the sun.
Personally I find it worthwhile just for the extra civility there is here in the comments and the peace of mind I get from knowing that I’m probably interacting with real people rather than bots. Maybe those benefits of using Lemmy could be emphasized more than the benefits of instancing and federation.
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I don’t think it’s probably being bottled. I think there are just a combination of people who would rather be unhappy where they are than face a bit of resistance getting themselves out of their rut and people who are fanatically devoted to legacy social media due to sunk cost and have a hard time abandoning their decade old accounts. So whenever the topic comes up they are happy to trash Lemmy rather than improve their situation. They are on Reddit alternatives sub for a reason but they won’t get off their ass because nothing is perfect enough for them
How is a person supposed to know which instance to choose before knowing what each instance is even about? Or what an instance even is. The barrier to creating an account is too high.
If there was an account migration option it would be possible to throw users into a random instance which federates with everyone and later let them migrate with their account age and post history.
yeah, the ui sucks ass if you dont use an app
