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?

  • @tasbir49@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    0
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.