I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but threads or comments about Lemmy or the Fediverse get downvoted a lot on Reddit and trolls who claim that it’s “dogshit” and “not going anywhere” get systematically upvoted.
Some of those trolls get then exposed when you ask them what Lemmy instance they tried and one of them with whom I had a surreal exchange answered with something like “yeah ofc I used Lemmy, this is the instance: join-lemmy.org” 🤦♂️
It’s frustrating that these trolls keep contributing to the big lie that “Lemmy is not ready yet” and that there’s “no viable alternative to Reddit”.
This and the overwhelming number of comments being “against the mod protests” just prompts me to question whether there isn’t some brigading being organized straight from the Reddit HQ.
As a tech savy person, I can confidently say lemmy is not a viable reddit alternative at this stage for an arbitrary reddit user. The UI and clients are just terrible and full of small bugs, annoyances and inconsistencies. Sure, it will eventually get there, but negative opinions about lemmy are not completely unmerrited. Just as I’m typing this, I get screen tears and flickering elements. It’s just very, very bleeding edge and I can absolutely see how someone trying it for 5 minutes would be turned off. If you want to capture the masses, the user experience has to impeccable.
PS: my first try at submitting this response timed out. This is my second try.
Thing is; I don’t want the “arbitrary reddit user”. I want the low-effort user to get irritated and leave.
That would likely also err content creators to leave, just because fewer people would be available to see the posts.
There certainly can (and should) be places that your typical user doesn’t want to go to, but if there’s nowhere for them to go then it will cause a hard stop on fediverse adoption.
Plus, it’s not like many of these issues wouldn’t affect non-arbitrary users. just they’re willing to put up with it. And that’s not a sign of a good site.
It doesn’t have to be impeccable. It doesn’t need corporations to buy ads. It just has to keep getting better and not die. Look at Linux. It never did overtake MacOS & Windows on desktops. But it keeps getting better and it didn’t die and it took over server rooms. Look at Mastodon. It’s nowhere near as popular as Twitter and maybe never will be, but it’s 5 years old and is steadily growing. I like hanging out there. Oak trees start as acorns.
Here’s an example: how can I subscribe to the topics I want to follow? I don’t want to see the 198 or whatever it is posts. Nor programmer humour. Lemmy has a great community of fans and users but if I can’t see only what I want I’m not going to use it.
I don’t know about lemmy but I’m using kbin and it’s pretty easy to subscribe to magazines (aka communities) and block the ones I don’t want to see
Speaking of Kbin i’ve had one gripe
If you turn on the top bar, it doesn’t show your subscribed magazines, just random magazines. I can click the Subscribed page but if nobody has posted in that magazine today It won’t show up.
I did just find that there is a place that just lists the magazine subscriptions if you need to see them, but it’s tucked in profile and you actually have to scroll to the right of the profile options to see it.