I only briefly browse old.reddit, my mobile usage is zero now Apollo is dead.
Lemmy is okay but it’s kind of a chicken and egg, less content means less users, but less users means less content.
It also doesn’t help that users are split between instances, so Firefox on lemmy.world will have different content/users than Firefox on lemmy.ml.
I can see that not driving people away but confusing people that aren’t massively tech savvy.
You can browse all across both instances though since they are federated.
Yeah, I know that, but on Reddit you could go to /r/Firefox and be almost guaranteed that that was the main place that people interested in Firefox would congregate. If you started scrolling, you’d see pretty much everything that anyone posted. For bigger subs there generally was one place to go to find that content.
While here, I could be on .world and see some stuff, but then I’d have to go to .ml or some other instance to see other stuff. Then you’ve got almost duplicate posts on different instances.
It’s just kind of messy. You can’t be on .world Firefox community and also see posts from the many other Firefox communities on the other instances, at least if you can I don’t know how you do it.
Sure, you can view all and see everything from everywhere, but that’s literally everything from everywhere, not just Firefox related stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, I like it here, and it’s good to have a potential viable alternative to Reddit. I’m just not sure how it’s going to catch on with Joe Public unless there is a way to tie the same/similar communities from different instances into the one view while still keeping them separate.
Major software foundations like Mozilla, and other large institutions, should be hosting their own instance and have official communities. Even on silos like Reddit, you’d have several alternate subs for the same topic. Before multis were a thing, it was in the same boat.
I would like to see instance features like “see this story in x other communities” links for reposted link posts though.
It would be nice if there was a way to group communities across instances so you can view them all at the same time. I would love to create an “Android” group that has all the different Android, Google and Google Pixel communities on one page.
When reddit had the same amount of content that lemmy has right now it was already its user’s main timewaster
It’s just a matter of time
There’s also power in just existing and becoming an increasingly more viable alternative to reddit. Between disappointment in the mods and how centralized things are, racist stuff invading the front page, ads, admins, … the less painful the transition becomes from one timesink to another the more the risk to Digg their own grave becomes threatening
The only thing I’m scared of is whether lemmy is capable of standing up to bad actors with its decentralized architecturr because if we imagined it becoming, say, half as popular as reddit; we’d start getting astroturfing campaigns and spam. And vote-manipulation is way easier here, and so is ban evasion
What if I want to browse the Firefox subreddit in one place, where all its content is gathered in a single location?
That’s like saying you signed up on both GMail and Yahoo Mail so you can get email from both Google and Yahoo users. I don’t understand why federation is such a difficult concept for people.
I can see that not driving people away but confusing people that aren’t massively tech savvy.
This is a disadvantage early, but it also weeds out a lot of the critical mass ignorance and a lot of the people who are unwilling to make any effort to think critically. I’m really looking forward to how it grows. The more popular it gets the more the pressure will be to have it be user friendly. Right now it feels like reddit from about a decade ago.
