Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?
To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
I honestly have a hard time using it outside of Jerboa. It’s not just UI, but functionality issues as well. I don’t blame people for being turned off. It’s a big part of the reason why I don’t think we’ll see large scale adoption. And I don’t even think the current way things are set up can handle large scale.
Lemmy is a good experiment, but I’m not sure this form of federation is going to work.
In FOSS there’s two kinds of people. Those who contribute to the change they want to see in the world, and people who bitch about unimportant things.