I like it. It’s not perfect though. The community signup thing is confusing and stressful because you dont and cant know the core values of the owner of the instance you sign up for. So you could get comfortable in a community and then find that the community is not a good fit and have to abandon it. For some people, who have a ton of alts on reddit, that might not be an issue but I find it stressful when I was trying to sign up for lemmy.ml and then find out their stance on a few political issues that drastically clash with mine.
I also dont like how the moderation passes community to community. I kind of like the idea of a black list but when you have communities with vastly different views resulting in people getting banned from one community for things that wouldnt get them banned from other communities you have a recipe for disaster. Right now, even with increased usage, the amount of moderation required should be low but if/when this blows up there is no way you will be able to sort/sift through the shared moderation logs for every community just to make sure people are not being unfairly banned from your community. That would be like a small sub on reddit banning people from r/pics because they didnt agree with the poster’s politics.
I just dont like that. It’s far from perfect and I dont have any solutions and it’s also possible I completely misunderstand the issues involved… But from what I read… I just dont like that.
Functionality, everything works and I like how it looks. It has a mobile app that works. There is a lot of new content. It seems like it has a shot at being a replacement for reddit.
They can be set up in multiple ways. One way is that only subscribed people can view. Another way is that only mods can view. Most of the protests were set to mod view only.