I mean, almost all social media has a learning curve but Lemmy is one that if you don’t put in the effort you’re not going to learn it and use it. It’s not seamless to master.
Design for it is an offshoot of what developers made that work for them. There’s a gap between that and what the lay person who grew up with phone apps are willing to put up with.
I know Lemmy will grow and develop. But there’s going to be a bleed off of active users from these waves of new members. I’m hoping that the communities grow fast and that the phone app is designed with the average high school kid or octogenarian in mind.
If I wasn’t a kid who grew up figuring out driver issues or the blue screen of death in Windows all of the time I may have moved on after my first couple of hours with Lemmy.
Truly. I want to see the platform grow and flourish. But it has some hurdles.
I feel like most successful social networks tend to have grown a bit like that tbh.
You get the super techy early adopters, then you get the tech enthusiasts, then you get the regular tech literate and finally the network effect is strong enough to get everyone else remotely interested to sign up.
I’d say that also probably correlates to an inverted progression of people willing to put up with bugs, missing functionality and perhaps a bit more of a wild west as people figure out how they’re going to interact with the network and the people on it.
The demographics of Reddit from 15 years ago were nothing like on Reddit 5 years ago and those are nothing like that which make up Reddit today.
Lemmy is a fantastic reminder of what Reddit used to be like. There’s something relaxing and fulfilling about being surrounded by like-minded individuals who are here for good. Once it becomes too large and easy to navigate, you get flooded with trolls and creeps. I honestly don’t care what happens to reddit at this point. The blackout and upcoming loss of third-party apps has converted me to Lemmy for the foreseeable future.
100% this, and it’s why I still used old.reddit.com, because the new reddit site is just awful.
What I will say is there is less “noise” on our lemmy/discussion forums, and distinctly higher quality posts. This is something we’d like to encourage long term, particularly when people ask questions already answered quite clearly on our website.
Welcome to anything that isn’t mainstream.
Altough I’ve had this talk with some people and I have to agree, most projects that are open source, foss, federated, selfhosted and such… are either cumbersome, requiere technical know-how, are complex (either to use, setup or update), think that command-line is good for everyone or have no users (or the userbase is questionable [and I don’t mean porn, I mean like voats was]).
Centralized services just work, that’s how you get the approval of people willing to try (without technical knowledge) and without the money to buy servers or upgrades.The rest will follow influencers, brands/products or goverment accounts, so we’re pretty much at lost there.
The rest will follow influencers, brands/products or goverment accounts, so we’re pretty much at lost there.
I think this is the key takeaway with every argument made in this way. People follow content, the content is the actual thing people use any of these services for. People today still use IRC and Usernet. Obviously we don’t want systems to be ridiculously complex, but if the “goal” is to be mainstream then this project is total waste of time. Thankfully that isn’t the goal, and the fediverse, I feel, has already proven to be successful. It’s different, and its differences are why people use it.
reddit wasn’t always the reddit we know today. It went through a lot of changes over the years, a lot of improvements. I see lemmy (and lemmy.one) as in that early stage. I had hoped to bring people with me from the exchristian community on reddit, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to be very successful.
Which isn’t to say that I’m giving up. Just that it’s not going to be as easy as I hoped.
As an ex-christian, I am glad to see /exchristian go in its Reddit state.
They’ll be back up in the morning. The top mod doesn’t intend to leave and neither do the others. It’s just me, apparently.
Oh well.
I already prefer using Lemmy over reddit. I can’t see anything that would make me go back. Even if it stops growing today.
That doesn’t sound so bad, the problem with making it so that everyone can use it is that suddenly you’ve got everyone using it. Personally I could do without the low-effort memes and copypasta comments, and I can just browse Reddit for ten minutes if I do need that fix!
Reddit was not exactly easy to use in the beginning. In fact the classic interface was kinda a disaster, even if it was still better than new.reddit
To some people it all hinges on the app. If you can develop a masterful app for their iPhone or Android then most of everything else is secondary. Unlike early adopters that’ll punch anything through a browser on multiple devices.
What’s nice is that anyone can make an app
Well I’m nearly 60, a Redditor from the Digg exodus days and I’m here. Not really sure wtf is going on but I’m sure over the next few weeks I’ll get there. This is it now, I deleted everything else SM wise, everything gone. Just fed up with it all but I feel I need an outlet for my ideas and opinions!
That’s a feature, not a bug. Better discussions and content will come from people willing to do and learn new things.
It’s really not that complicated, and I only expect it to get more stream lined as time goes on.
That being said I probably am in the tinkerer/kinda sorta tech savvy demo that would say that.
