I havent used Mlem but Jerboa works decently well, and you can use the web version as a PWA.

I agree that theres alot of work that needs to be put into lemmy, especially regarding making discovering communities easier. they need to make it so when you click on a community thats outside your instance it automatically opens it via your instance, but other than that i havent really had many issues with lemmy.

you can find a list of a bunch of communities here https://browse.feddit.de/ , and if you wanna subscribe to them you search for them like this “!gaming@beehaw.org” at least that works on the web version, in the Jerboa app seems like you can just search normally and it should show up if its federated with your instance. It is still a bit buggy but thats gonna pass with time

“Fairly simply once you get the hang of it” isn’t good enough. If you want people to use your service, you make it idiot proof.

I agree with this in the general sense that essentially gatekeeping by everything being a little too jank isn’t a good thing. It should be easier to get people to understand how lemmy works and helping people jump into the experience of scrolling through discussions and memes.

kbin works much better for that and I’ve been recommending it to people who feel overwhelmed by the initial lemmy experience. I used it myself when the information overload left me lost and confused.

It didn’t take me long to move back here and learn to navigate and enjoy the lemmy experience though!

Actually I’d prefer to not have idiots here so please keep the learning curve, thanks.

Also apps in general are a fucking blight on the internet.

EDIT: Since I’m getting downvotes with no substantial replies, let me expand this a bit.

The quality of discussions on Lemmy and the like currently are quite high, and as we’ve seen over time with reddit, when you have an influx of people not familiar with discussion communities, the quality of discussion degrades and you have more and more “problem” users that admins and moderators need to handle. Making Lemmy more “user friendly” is the first step to having this problem. A learning curve means it actually weeds out people unwilling to adjust their expectations and behaviors in said community. (Personal opinion, I think it speaks volumes about people when they are unwilling to do a slight amount of learning to be able to participate.)

Secondly, mobile apps have been mostly used to track people across the internet and consolidate the information on them in one place, and rejecting common internet standards. These are all net negatives, in my view, and why I struggle to want to use “apps” in their current form. Standards and meeting standards matters, as well as rejecting attempts to track and classify users. I’ve seen the app ecosystem harm the internet in great ways, and seen very little positive come out of it.

If you have an argument against these points, it would be nice for you to contribute. A downvote should not be “I disagree with this opinion and want to hide it, but I can’t be bothered to make my own argument against it.” That’s just plain old school reddiquette.