this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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What’s with the cynicism towards Lemmy on r/RedditAlternatives and Reddit in general? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by Frz@sh.itjust.works to c/reddit@lemmy.ml
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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?

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[–] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Melon_Cooler@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Agreed. While I am more favourable to platforms like Lemmy and Kbin on a more or less ideological level (I hate how the internet is essentially five companies in a trench coat at this point, all using user generated content and data for their own profits), Reddit as an experience isn't terrible enough for me to throw it away yet (or at least, these sites can't replicate what I'm looking for well enough to make me commit to jumping ship just yet).

I'm glad these platforms are getting a lot more attention, I'm glad to see them grow and mature (both in terms of userbase, but as well as functionality), and I want them to succeed. However, once the dust from the blackout has settled (most of the subs I normally visited are still private, which I fully support), I will probably jump back to Reddit until the restless march towards enshitification strikes once again, and I leave the platform more or less for good (with these platforms at the top of the list of alternatives for me to return to).

[–] Otome-chan@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

that subreddit naturally has a pessimistic tone because they're all sick of reddit, but haven't felt that the alternatives presented are worth switching to. Lemmy has been posted on there a few times, and I myself was dismissive of it (and still now I do not use lemmy). kbin had what I wanted though, so I commented such on that subreddit and now here I am.

different people have different needs. sometimes, the alternative just isn't active enough to really be worth switching to (no one else is joining you). other times the ui might be clunky or weird or not something you like. the fediverse concept is a bit difficult for non-technical people. Though I think kbin's federation downtime kinda helped mitigate that for a lot of us (and there was a lot of educating here on kbin about what that was all about). for kbin you just join kbin. but lemmy it's a bit daunting with all the instances.

[–] spider@vlemmy.net 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

What are people promoting right now if not Lemmy?

[–] away2thestars@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some are promoting tilde or other centralised solutions that will have the same issue of Reddit sooner or later

[–] dan@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I feel like I need to type out a full thesis paper in order to fit in with the type over on Tildes.

[–] Tobi@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The main thing for me is that i dislike the federation. Also the UI is a bit ugly but that's easily fixable

[–] JasSmith@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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.