So much happened this week! After talking about a grab bag of news, Andrew and David take turns explaining what exactly is going on with Reddit and the Apoll...
Yeah I was a little disappointed to not get any mention of Lemmy or kbin, but I know their growth isn’t the biggest element of that news. As a group they have seemed mostly dismissive of the fediverse, with only Adam the producer even remotely active on Mastodon.
I also feel like they could’ve mentioned the NSFW ban from the API. Whether you watch porn or not I think that’s an overlooked part of all this. Other than that I think they did a great overview.
Realistically Lemmy is not a suitable substitute for 90% of users, which is fine. Its just not intuitive enough.
It can appear identical, but doesn’t function identical and requires a bit of research. There’s a learning curve to how instances work, finding communities, etc. Its not hard, but it doesn’t function like reddit does, most people expect a site where they can go to a website, punch in what they’re interested in, and get results.
Lemmy is not hard to understand, but most people are just going to leave if it doesn’t act immediately how they expect it to. But like I said, its fine. Its active enough here, and I hope it continues to grow, but its not going to rival a major website like reddit. I kinda like that though, this place reminds me of some niche forums I was active on 15 years ago.
At least the second problem should mostly be solved with a third party app. If you take a Reddit user on RIF and give them jerboa, it should be basically the same experience. Just the sign-up experience might be confusing, and jerboa could use some bug fixes.
Marques in particular has been critical of the fediverse for being too complicated for the average user. I don’t blame him entirely - talk of different servers and federation is pretty confusing. Even for a tech savvy person, it takes some time to really understand it.
Yeah I was a little disappointed to not get any mention of Lemmy or kbin, but I know their growth isn’t the biggest element of that news. As a group they have seemed mostly dismissive of the fediverse, with only Adam the producer even remotely active on Mastodon.
I also feel like they could’ve mentioned the NSFW ban from the API. Whether you watch porn or not I think that’s an overlooked part of all this. Other than that I think they did a great overview.
Realistically Lemmy is not a suitable substitute for 90% of users, which is fine. Its just not intuitive enough.
Not intuitive enough?
It can appear identical to an end user via the right client.
It can appear identical, but doesn’t function identical and requires a bit of research. There’s a learning curve to how instances work, finding communities, etc. Its not hard, but it doesn’t function like reddit does, most people expect a site where they can go to a website, punch in what they’re interested in, and get results.
Lemmy is not hard to understand, but most people are just going to leave if it doesn’t act immediately how they expect it to. But like I said, its fine. Its active enough here, and I hope it continues to grow, but its not going to rival a major website like reddit. I kinda like that though, this place reminds me of some niche forums I was active on 15 years ago.
This is only the case because of these two issue trackers:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048
Once they’re solved, using lemmy will not require any additional knowledge than reddit.
Those are definitely the most significant pain points I’ve observed so far. Hopefully they are both addressed soon
At least the second problem should mostly be solved with a third party app. If you take a Reddit user on RIF and give them jerboa, it should be basically the same experience. Just the sign-up experience might be confusing, and jerboa could use some bug fixes.
Marques in particular has been critical of the fediverse for being too complicated for the average user. I don’t blame him entirely - talk of different servers and federation is pretty confusing. Even for a tech savvy person, it takes some time to really understand it.