It will absolutely.

1. The average non-tech savvy person will be extremely confused about how federated services operate. You say "join lemmy', and they say, 'ok, what's the site?" and then you need to explain, well, you need to pick one of about four thousand instances, and then only go there when you want to sign in. Now they're already confused. That can then be explained 'It's like e-mail, lots of different servers to get email, but they all work together." But this doesn't hit as well because a website is not e-mail, and so interconnected websites are not immediately intuitive. And as soon as you start going into any level of technical details, the average person just tunes out and decides "I don't want to deal with this crap."

2. If they pick an instance (Like Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works) that allows free signup, they won't have too much of a problem. If they pick one that has questions to answer and then a manual approval process that is COMPLETELY opaque, they will nope the fuck out immediately and not even bother to find other instances. Heck, I was turned off of Lemmy for several days because of this, and I'm very tech savvy, and have been doing this sort of crap forever. I signed up first at Lemmy.one, which eventually got my login active, but took 3 days. When I saw no indication of that signup working, though, I tried Beehaw. That STILL has not been activated and it's been 5 or 6 days, and of course, there's no indication of what's going on during that time...it's just a spinning wheel. Not until I went to an instance that didn't have these ridiculous manual approvals did I begin using Lemmy. The average user is not going to bother with that.

These are going to be the biggest things that hold Lemmy back (there are also some serious usability issues with the main feed, concerning repeat posts showing for DAYS, and the autorefresh everywhere, which pushes content down constantly if you're in the New feed).

Ah, to be young and piss on reddit again. Back in my days, we had to use TamperMonkey and manually copy the scripts we wanted to use to delete reddit comments.

You young folks don't know how good you have it!

WE HAD TO DELETE OUR CONTENT IN THE RAIN AND WIND WHILE WALKING UPHILL WITH ANGRY DOGS CHASING US WHILE STEVE HUFFMAN WAS PERSONALLY ACCUSING EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US OF MURDER!

The idea of Shreddit takes me back to when I first joined Reddit in 2011. At the time, I was in my mid 20s going to rock/metal concerts pretty often. A friend of mine encouraged me to sign up for Reddit and to check out the Shreddit community. It took me ages to figure out she was talking about /r/metal.

I bring that up to make the point that community discovery in my early days of Reddit was pretty difficult, but I eventually figured it out. In time, I'm sure the same thing will happen with Lemmy.

On the one hand I lean into a hard disagree with this idea. I get wanting to protect ones privacy but on the other hand that's so much information being purged that could help others. I use Google to search reddit for my problems everyday and id be so heartbroken to not be able to do that anymore.

I’m curious if anyone else can replicate this, but I used redact.dev to delete my post/comment history. Then I requested for the data download using GDPR as my reasoning.

At this point, my comment history et al was gone. I was about to delete my account too, but I figured I’d wait for the download link in my messages.

That was three days ago, I’ve checked for the link every day and instead of it appearing. All my posts & comments have been restored in a piecemeal fashion.

1 comment after the first day, 5 comments the next day, and so on.

These were comments that redact.dev had edited, then deleted.

Still no data download link tho

Is there some way you can copy your posts or guides here before deleting them?

I used Power Delete Suite to do the same.

Thanks. Just deleted all my comments, posts, and votes on my 12 year Reddit account.

I have no intention of going back. Besides the smaller subreddits the place has been absolutely trashed for years now. I'd rather stick and help grow smaller communities.