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.
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).
Well, people are looking for a exact replica of Reddit, with all of its fleshed out functionality and even content. They also want one monolithic app that can host every piece of information and every user ever on the same website. FOMO is real. However, it seems like most people don’t understand that these new alternative websites will need time to be fleshed out technically and that to be able to do what Reddit does requires huge infrastructure and a way to afford that infrastructure. As long as the goal is corporate gains, we will never find that magical unicorn that will always make decisions based on users / general publics interest. What if we moved over to Squabbles? How long will Squabbles be able to afford itself until it gets big enough and makes the same changes that Reddit does / did?
Despite all of it’s downfalls, that’s where Federation really shines. Almost all Lemmy / Kbin servers are currently running at a personal hobby levels of investment (except the biggest instances) and the big instances are struggling with the demand because new users (me included when I opened up my account) are naturally choosing the biggest instances to sign up out of FOMO or fear of losing their accounts in the future.
Lemmy / Kbin and even the federation itself is not ready for general mass consumer. There will be growing pains, and lots of it. However, good thing about open source software, as long as there are people willing to populate these websites and generate content, we will always have people willing to contribute on the technical side of things as well. I truly believe if we can keep the federation alive, it will come to a point where it will be ready for the general consumer. We, the early adapters, in my humble opinion, should manage our expectations. We will not kill Reddit but we don’t need to. We just need to keep Lemmy / Kbin / Mastodon and the federation alive.
Do people expect a fully functional Reddit clone with all the same features to conveniently exist somewhere they can hop to?
Yes.
EDIT: Ok, I should add something more. Sadly, yes. I’ve seen comments from people say pretty much that. “I went there and there’s no content and the UI isn’t great”. hrumph. Of course there isn’t and no one should expect there to be. Reddit didn’t start with all that shit either, but Reddit exists now and it pleases a lot of people, despite the cracks forming all around them.
Lemmy suffers for the tankie sentiments (i.e. pro-Putin and pro-CCP) of the founder and major instances. Kbin has the benefits of Lemmy without those drawbacks.
There are a ton of places that want to be the next reddit and everyone is trying to get everyone else to migrate to their platform.
None are ready yet and each have concerns. Lemmy, Kbin, and fediverse platforms have been dominating a lot of the discussion but they aren’t Reddit and they probably never will be (especially not by July 1st).
You have a lot of confusion and frustration that there just isn’t another Reddit out there yet. To all those I say that Reddit didn’t happen overnight and it’s all going to take time.
I just joined Lemmy 2 days ago and heard about it last week because of all the protest. I don’t find it unintuitive at all, but I can understand the confusion.
Most people want something simple. Going on Reddit all one needs to do (nowadays) is login -> login with <service_name> and boom that person just made an account.
On Lemmy you have to pick an instance -> choose which instance you want to join (which can be hard for some people or they can find it unintuitive) -> go to register and create an account (and sometimes wait for it to be accepted, or even answer questions before that. Although there are instances that don’t need all this stuff, the amount of choices can make it difficult). It might not look hard, but to someone that wants something simple and easy is probably not very good of an experience.
It took me a minute to figure it out 2 days ago and I don’t think I’m a dummy, but who knows. That said, my “Reddit sort by top-> this hour” addiction is already well being fed and I’m happy.
That’s what turned me off from Lemmy. I had no clue what I was doing to begin with, then I tried to register for an instance, and the sign up button just kept spinning forever. So I tried another instance. It wanted me to type out why I wanted to join and answer some questions. Like, what? I’m not jumping through hoops to use your service. Plus, as far as I’m aware, your username you register with on one instance doesn’t follow you into other instances. It makes zero sense to me.
It’s Like signing up for a gmail account. You can email yahoo accounts, but your username won’t work to log into yahoo.
I went though the same issues as you. I was able to get a lemmy account and a kbin, and fedia account. Now kbin has enable federation, and the feed is muchhhhh more active. The traffic to the sites have slowed down a bit and they have mostly scaled up their servers. Works great for me now.
It’s not quite that simple though. It would be like if Yahoo email users weren’t able to see emails from GMail users in some cases. Like beehaw people can’t see posts from us lemmy.world users.
I disagree, I think it’s still pretty solid comparison. Some email servers are blacklisted entirely by others and emails originating from those won’t come in. That’s not a very common thing but it does happen.
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.
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???
Like a lot of new users I’m only here because Reddit killed the app I used. I don’t like the official Reddit app. But if I’m honest, it’s still a better experience than Lemmy right now. You can’t deny that Lemmy has less content and more warts.
Like any early adopter, I’m here for the potential. For what I hope this can one day become. That’s not something a majority of people care about. If/when Lemmy reaches parity for “normal” users, attitudes will change quickly.
Yeah, I’m not too concerned with the users who go “Looks interesting but a little too confusing for me right now so I’ll pass.” What bothers me is the ones who outright spread “Lol these alternatives are shit, Lemmy will never take off, too counterintuitive, this site has no future!!!”. Like chill guys, it takes time. Not your thing yet? Fine. But why be so quick to outright dismiss it?
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.
So we’re not in r/RedditAlternatives speaking in favor of Lemmy.
This is important. I’ve mentioned it before. There are probably levels of people: and those that straight up quit, are no longer a voice on Reddit. You could go back with a goal to draw people away, but I think it’s also valid to let things play out their course. I’m still missing some subreddits I went to, especially those where I lurked rather than posted. I can live with that loss. I don’t use Twitter any more and I didn’t replace that with anything. I’m sure my life will go on without some replacement subreddits for now.
These are all great points as well. There were a lot of different ways to interact with and use Reddit. I didn’t really live in any subs as much as use Reddit to see random things to pass my time and occasionally get help from certain subs.
Even in the knowledge based usage for me, i was usually around long enough to get the startup knowledge to waste time and money and storage space on a new hobby, ignore the subreddit that got me started as I explored the new hobby, then answer the questions that the old hands got tired of answering but I had fresh experience to answer without the exhaustion of answering the same questions over and over again.
I think Lemmy is going to hit my needs absolutely on target. I don’t think I’ll delete my Reddit account or blast my old comments, bit that depends somewhat on how spez continues to push forward. In many ways I’m glad I’m being pushed to try something new.
This is getting a lot longer than I thought I would go. I’ll wrap it up with saying I’m also noticing that without the critical mass of Reddit, the spamming, trolls, manipulation farms aren’t here yet that I’ve seen and it’s been a really refreshing experience to see the increased quality of posts and conversations. Even with shit posts and memes.
I feel like there’s a certain level of positivity and optimism here that I haven’t felt on Reddit for a long time. I hope we keep that.
Keep in mind that many that want to leave have left, they don’t need RedditAlternatives.
Eventually only the ones that haven’t been convinced yet will remain in RedditAlternatives
Survivor bias.
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.
When I joined reddit (migrating from Imgur, I know, I know) I didn’t get how it worked either. Before that I migrated from another platform, and before that I migrated from another platform. Its been the same each and every time.
Once you just start using it and it becomes your new reality, the days of the previous platform feel distant.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.
Do people expect a fully functional Reddit clone with all the same features to conveniently exist somewhere they can hop to?
Yes.
Do people not realise that Reddit itself was just as confusing when users migrated from Digg all those years ago?
No.
Do they not realise sites take time to mature?
No.
The type of people posting the comments you’re not happy about are also not the type of people who would do well on a network like this. They want a spoonfeeding experience, they think everyone else also wants a spoonfeeding experience, and if one wants a spoonfeeding experience, bleeding-edge decentralized social networks ain’t it.
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.
