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?

  • Zenith@lemm.ee
    11·
    18 hours ago

    I have zero tech skills and I’m here I do think the emails back and forth to get my original log in was obnoxious, it literally took days, and I have no idea how to start communities, I have no idea what the “federation” or “fediverse” is, I don’t understand “instances” and I really do miss Reddit for how easy all those things are but I figure eventually I’ll get it and this will feel like home. If all you want to do is make an account to scroll it’s pretty easy but I do agree everything else is hard/obnoxious and it will definitely slow down growth. That said I was on reddit since almost the beginning and growing quickly only came in the past several years and it really destroyed the site, so growing slowly isn’t inherently a bad thing. I do wish there was simple videos to watch on things like how to make a community though