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?
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.
To be fair some stuff is weird.
No error messages
My instance just got defeded, does that mean someone unsubcribed from a sub for me?
What happens if my instance admin deleted my instance?
Not super straight forward if you just want to join and read/write about programming for example
Your instance being defeded is like if the mods of a subreddit decided to ban all members of your subreddit from accessing their subreddit, and banned all their members from accessing your subreddit.
If your instance admin deletes your instance, it would be like if Gmail shut down overnight. Everything being hosted on Gmail including your accounts would be gone. But the other email services would still be up and email as a whole would still work.
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.
Like any early adopter, I’m here for the potential.
Bingo. Some of the alternatives are relatively new. Focusing on potential is exactly the right approach. This is not Reddit, nor should it try to be. Focusing on the engagement is refreshing and mobile apps will come and grow eventually. I’ll miss Apollo for sure but so far, I’m likely the experience here.
I really respect the admins for keeping things going during the influx.
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.
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.
Yeah, when I went to Reddit during the Great Digg Migration, two things jumped out at me: this UI kinda sucks, and the content kinda sucks. It was still heavily dominated by tech topics, like Slashdot. It took a while to grow into the ‘front page of the internet’.
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.
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.
This space also just isn’t mature enough for a lot of people. The federated nature of things makes young sites and young communities, uh, confusing for some. That really fades away when the influx stabalizes and growth curves become shallow and predictable.
It’ll grow, and develop its own culture, and become a reliable and solid alternative to Reddit. Right now, it’s both a gamble for people, and also somewhere they can view as “stealing” something from them.
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.
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.
What are people promoting right now if not Lemmy?
kbin.social is mentioned a few times on that sub’s submission titles currently.
Some are promoting tilde or other centralised solutions that will have the same issue of Reddit sooner or later
I feel like I need to type out a full thesis paper in order to fit in with the type over on Tildes.
In my opinion kbin (federated) and tildes (centralized) are the best currently available alternatives to reddit.
Tilde has the support of the guy who made the automod on reddit so I can see it’s popularity, but being centralised opens it up to a lot of the problems reddit has developed and will develop
I’d only add that it’s safe to assume that Reddit is engaged in an astroturfing campaign against any potentially viable alternatives.
Conveniently enough, I think the fediverse has already reached the point that it can’t be stopped by bad publicity. There are enough people already here that it’s pretty much here to stay. And in fact, I think a case could be made that anyone who doesn’t even investigate the fediverse because of what some yahoo, shill or bot on Reddit says isn’t much of a loss anyway.
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.
Big part of why I’m on kbin despite Lemmy seeming to be more popular, and the cool thing about these sites is that it doesn’t really matter what I chose because I can see all of the content nonetheless. Federation is an amazing tech that makes me way more excited about the viability of these alternatives.
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.The main thing for me is that i dislike the federation. Also the UI is a bit ugly but that’s easily fixable
Aside from the adjustment to not having centralizated single points of entry for popular topics, and the early growing pains being experienced right now… what’s not to like about federation? Isn’t that what ensures we won’t fall into the same trap down the road where user/moderator benefit is deprioritized for the sake of commercialization?
@Awhiskeydrunker Or someone spins up a server/instance has the same, or worse, hissy fit that mods and reddit is having now and turns it off entirely. lemmy and mastodon have been around for a long time and the ui is still…weird (being nice) ie clunky af. with a ton of rube goldberg round about ways to log in to do w/e, and saturated with technobabble. Look at beehaw. A bunch of redditors just wanting a new home as bystanders of a tempertantrum mods and spez are having. Showed up, most just perfectly nice people I guess. and not a day latter beehaw is rejecting new users and doubled down on technobable and pasted their magnum carta long rambling philosophical stuff. making excuses to why. Having something that can seemlessly have a smart automatic way where spawns mirrors. So that it’s more likely to have uptime, maybe a little like what kazza could do back in the day. That’d be cool af. But right now it’s on temperamental socially maladjusted people to do that manually. Assuming they have more than one computer, and assuming it runs linux. Correct me that i’m wrong kbin and lemmy don’t have simple .exes for lemmy and kbin.
That means its even more likely to turn into a complete debacle if/when people don’t want to be cordial and politic,
Do you dislike the federation or the implementation thereof? I think for me and many others, it’s the latter. Federation is exactly what we need to ensure we don’t create another Reddit. But it’s implemented so badly that it’s turning people away. Thankfully I think it can be fixed easily.
Discoverability is a huge issue right now. Forcing people to use hard-to-find submenus to manually search for communities on other instances using, effectively, commands (!community@instance.TLD) is crazy.
Another issue is account migration. I understand this is a high priority for the Lemmy devs.
Honestly, if Apollo just pointed at all these federated servers right now, I’d be pretty happy.
Both. Federation could certainly be done better, but in general i don’t think it’s necessary and i would always consider it as a negative. The main issue i have right now other than discoverability is the unnecessary cross instance drama with instances blocking each other for no real reason
