I don’t get the migration issues, at all.

I’m literally an idiot and all I did was type ‘Lemmy World’ into Google, clicked the top result, created an account, and selected 50 or so communities to follow. Then I started posting.

I don’t know what the Fediverse is or other instances or how it all works (and I don’t really care).

This was dumb-shit easy to figure out - as easy as Facebook or Twitter or… Reddit.

Source: am dumb shit.

don’t be surprised if it gets astroturfed with anti-Lemmy content by the admins. They are not above that level of fuckery. And in fact I would outright expect it.

check the accounts of people posting negative about it- default name_name<number> schemas and account ages of less than 10 days all scream astroturf accounts.

I disagree.

Realism is better.

Nothing worse than positivity “switch to Linux - you can do anything you like” gets followed up with “Now I installed it, and I can’t make it do anything I want” leading to anger.

Just invite folks to join, and patiently explain how stuff works…

Better still, have a direct link to threads on Lemmy.

In the midst of wading through a sea of people talking about Lemmy admins being tankies and other (mostly untrue) propaganda about the platform, the most legit criticism I’ve heard about Lemmy has honestly been from my older brother.

We had a conversation about Reddit alternatives given the recent news, and his honest take was “I don’t give a fuck about federation. Just give me something that works!”

What they need isn’t positivity, what they need is a tutorial. Right now, the barriers of entry for lemmy (and kbin and mastodon and other fediverse places) are too high for the common layman. They just want something that they can throw their names in and it just works. They don’t want to know about federation and instances and how the fediverse works. They don’t want to have to research the differences between instances and pick one that seems best for them, they are just going to pick a random one and expect it to see everything.

I want to share my first experience with the Fediverse. During the Twitter Exodus, I heard about Mastodon and, being curious, decided to give it a go. I installed the Mastodon app and tried to sign up, and I had no idea what the Fediverse is or what these instances are. I was expecting a simple signup process like Twitter. I was confused through the signup process, wondering why do I need to “pick an instance”, what’s the difference, what am I doing. Even after I picked an instance and got in, I had no clue how to find people to follow, how to see everybody’s posts (didn’t help that I barely used Twitter in the first place and thus was unfamiliar with this sort of place), why is my feed full of devs and programmers (I accidentally picked a tech industry themed instance randomly). It took too much time and effort to learn (and I wasn’t committed or interested enough), so I eventually abandoned it.

Nowadays, I have a much better understanding of all this, lemmy is more comfortable for me, and thus I am having a much better experience. But for many who have no experience with the Fediverse, all of this is a lot, and it may be too much effort for them to dig in and learn how all this works. The general UX of lemmy needs to be streamlined and made, if not easier, then more approchable. Only then will more and more people be willing to join and participate in the Fediverse.

This might be a hot take but I’m okay with having some barriers to entry that demonstrate patience, understanding, and hope.

Took a gander and it seems it’s mostly from people having issues with lemmy.world and not knowing about the others you could join. I made my first account there too so I know their frustration. Made a new one on blahaj and it’s been smooth sailing since.

I want to help all these people migrate and I have been doing that all through June, but I’ve committed to never posting or commenting on my account ever again, so unfortunately the remaining Redditors aren’t going to get any more help from me.

I’m loving it. Feels raw, the glitches aren’t too frustrating compared to having content aggregated again without having to go to Reddit, digg, or fark

Of course it will hurt the migration. Lemmy.world should’ve halted open registration and directed folks elsewhere until they were able to get their house in order.

Instead, a migrant’s experience was as follows:
“I can’t create an account, the site won’t load”.
“Okay, now I have an account, but I browse anything because the site won’t load.”
“Okay, now I can browse, but I can’t make posts or comments because the site won’t load”.
“The site’s been wishy-washy for 5 days, I guess it’s always like this”.

Most don’t understand they should’ve joined a different instance. But hey, this QoL stuff affects all Lemmings, because the biggest communities are in the affected instances.

So instead of a great Reddit alternative, migrants got a product that didn’t work as advertised. And a message board, no less - a technology that’s existed since the dawn of the internet.

So, I get it. But I’m not upset because I understand Lemmy is an emerging technology that’ll require a little patience. Replacing one of the biggest websites of all time is not going to be easy.

r/Lemmy is going to reflect the layman. We should listen to their feedback, help them out and take criticism seriously. I’m of the camp that Lemmy needs as few barriers to entry as possible - which is why I’m loving the progress of some of these mobile apps. Some (like Memmy) have an onboarding guide for new users. We need more of that.