Honestly, I’ve made peace with the fact that there are obstacles with these platforms for the mainstream user. And I think that is ok and can be beneficial for us in the long run.
Yeah, we need a critical mass of users to make posts and comments so people stick around, but honestly, most sites got worse when the mainstream users started joining. Basically, it’s the dreaded Eternal September.
Reddit content quality started degrading after the 2010 Digg migration to the point you had to subscribe from the defaults and find smaller subreddits, which basically simulate the experience of a smaller website.
I’m ok if the average Redditor or Twitter user doesn’t come to Lemmy/Mastodon at the beginning or even ever.
My grief with articles like this is that their “X is not there yet” statement rarely comes off as “It has rough edges but its improving”, but always as “This product is flawed. Dont even bother”.
And itd be fine if it’s just someone’s opinion, but here it’s someone’s opinion in a news article. The effect is that someone unaware of the fediverse will read that, assume that opinion is fact and never try the platform. Not only that, they’ll also start stating the same opinion to others as if they experienced it first-hand…
Articles should bridge the gap of knowledge! Stop dissuading people from trying new stuff and encourage them to give it a go!
Sure, promoting lemmy as a drop-in replacement of reddit is downright dishonest. But it never hurts to create an account and see what the fuss is about. The article should work as a heads up to avoid headaches, not the website altogether.
Who knows, maybe it will be a perfect replacement for you, despite everything. I know it was for me.
they’ll also start stating the same opinion to others as if they experienced it first-hand…
That’s the worst part of such articles, that’s how misinformation spreads and why it’s so difficult to combat.
People need to think on their own, find multiple sources of info and learn to tell the difference between reliable magazines and click-baiting, and try by themselves every time it’s possible (like in this case).
maybe it will be a perfect replacement for you
It is for me as well as you.
Need to solve issue that almost every services (Kbin, Pixelfed, Mastodon) need independent account to read their contents.
That website probably gets a large portion of its clicks from Reddit. Of course it wants to maintain the status quo and bash anything that will affect that.
That article is a big ooof.
