In other places on around the web, (chiefly /r/RedditAlternatives) whenever Lemmy is brought up, invariably I see the exact same complaints from brand new accounts.
Lemmy is too complicated, it wont gain traction, can’t figure out how to use it, can’t log in, etc.
Now, I’m definitely more tech savvy than the average redditor, but I just don’t see the complaints. You can go to any Lemmy site, instantly start doomscrolling with a familiar UI, and sign up on all the instances I’ve tried has been frankly more simple than making a new reddit account. The only real complaint I have is the generally smaller volume of users and posts.
My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.
Ideally, the first link someone sees when googling Lemmy would be a global feed on a fairly generic instance, with a basic tagline akin to ‘front page of the internet.’ End users don’t need to care about the technical details, at least not until they’re interested in the platform.
So is this “Lemmy is too confusing” sentiment even real? And if not, what motive would there be to astroturf this?
If it is a real issue affecting would-be users, how can we address it?
Maybe, but I believe in Occam’s razer. The simplest solution is probably correct.
The average user is incredibly lazy. Insanely lazy. Reddit has taught them that they should be just spoonfed content constantly with no assistance. People aren’t used to going out to find communities anymore. To them even these basic concepts are then “frustrating” and “complex”. It’s unfortunate, but that’s really how lazy they are.
They can’t go to the search bar, type in television, and hit subscribe, it’s literally too much for them.
People are ready for alternatives to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook… Can a community on reddit shutdown, and seamlessly transfer to lemmy within a few days while archiving the subreddits history? Will the new Lemmy be hands off moderation at the site level so that conversation can be had? If you can give people a yes to both people will join.
Sure, but the complaints I see are never “I don’t see content there that I like”, it’s always “its too complicated and I can’t sign up/see content at all”
but if you make it to any Lemmy site, you’re right there on the home feed instantly, same as reddit.
So is it really a problem of users not even making it to an instance? Are they really all getting brick-walled by join-lemmy.org, or is something else going on here?
There is an increasing difficulty to even find out that join-lemmy.org exists.
To be fair join-lemmy.org also is a rather awful bit of user onboarding. It’s very much a programmer design. Which is something all of Lemmy suffers from.
There’s fine line between a good design, and over simplification. But Lemmy is pretty firmly a mile away playing in the “it works” pool.
Also, Lemmy has ways of discovering communities. Just browse the all-local or all-federated feeds and you’ll see what communities are popular.
The “can’t sign up” complaints might have something to do with how most instances make you answer questions like “why do you want to sign up” and “what communities will you browse” as a simple way of stopping automated sign-ups, and if they didn’t put anything in the box or just said things like “IDK I’m from Reddit” they might have been rejected due to the admins thinking they’re a bot or spammer or something.
Gonna throw in my personal conspiracy theory (that I don’t have any evidence for): I haven’t been on Reddit Alternatives since I found Lemmy, but based on what i remember, there seem to be quite a few people who have spun up their own projects and are promoting them pretty hard on that subreddit. Who’s to say if one or more of them decided to buy bot comments to smear their competitors?
Yeah, that’s the type of motive I was struggling to find. I could absolutely see that happening.
I think a good chunk of them are just confused by going to join-lemmy and not be given a sign up in their face. Sure, we know that about 5 seconds of reading comprehension skill would get them where they want to go, but the vast majority of users don’t have that. Look how many people will walk up to a cash register/till with a sign on it that says “credit card only” and then be confused that they don’t take cash. Most people don’t read anymore.
I think you described short form video like reels, tiktok, shorts users as well perfectly.