r/Lemmy right now is full of posts basically talking about how bad Lemmy is handling right now.
It’s a bad look and will probably hurt the migration.
I know we are moving off of Reddit but the Lemmy subreddit needs some positivity for people looking to migrate
This might be a hot take but I’m okay with having some barriers to entry that demonstrate patience, understanding, and hope.
I’m pretty stupid and don’t like reading big walls of text but I was able to work out the basics lying in bed with one eye open, and had started subbing to communities by the time I was having my first morning coffee.
Sure, I ended up changing my mind on instances a couple of times and now have a few dupe accounts, but I was good to go after about three days of playing around. And again, I’m stupid and easily distracted.
If other ex-redditors can’t work it out, they’re very welcome to stay where they are.
Yup. What made me decide to leave is the fact that I’m going to a place full of people who don’t agree with Reddit’s policies, and who are willing to fight a modest learning curve to join a more future-proof community. I’d rather be with people who care about that kind of thing and are kind of nerds about it, even if it doesn’t have as much content as Reddit in its early days. It’s making me nostalgic for Reddit 12 years ago anyway.
I agree. If someone can’t even get through the incredibly mild filter of figuring out how to make a Lemmy account and deal with some of the community-finding niggles (or, heaven forbid, download a free third-party app that will streamline the whole process for you), then I seriously wonder what kind of positive contribution they would bring to the Fediverse.
I want to help all these people migrate and I have been doing that all through June, but I’ve committed to never posting or commenting on my account ever again, so unfortunately the remaining Redditors aren’t going to get any more help from me.
What they need isn’t positivity, what they need is a tutorial. Right now, the barriers of entry for lemmy (and kbin and mastodon and other fediverse places) are too high for the common layman. They just want something that they can throw their names in and it just works. They don’t want to know about federation and instances and how the fediverse works. They don’t want to have to research the differences between instances and pick one that seems best for them, they are just going to pick a random one and expect it to see everything.
I want to share my first experience with the Fediverse. During the Twitter Exodus, I heard about Mastodon and, being curious, decided to give it a go. I installed the Mastodon app and tried to sign up, and I had no idea what the Fediverse is or what these instances are. I was expecting a simple signup process like Twitter. I was confused through the signup process, wondering why do I need to “pick an instance”, what’s the difference, what am I doing. Even after I picked an instance and got in, I had no clue how to find people to follow, how to see everybody’s posts (didn’t help that I barely used Twitter in the first place and thus was unfamiliar with this sort of place), why is my feed full of devs and programmers (I accidentally picked a tech industry themed instance randomly). It took too much time and effort to learn (and I wasn’t committed or interested enough), so I eventually abandoned it.
Nowadays, I have a much better understanding of all this, lemmy is more comfortable for me, and thus I am having a much better experience. But for many who have no experience with the Fediverse, all of this is a lot, and it may be too much effort for them to dig in and learn how all this works. The general UX of lemmy needs to be streamlined and made, if not easier, then more approchable. Only then will more and more people be willing to join and participate in the Fediverse.
It’s like they say in gambling, “The House always wins”
Trying to force a community on Reddit to be favorable towards one of its primary competitors is a fruitless endeavor. Historically, the admins, including spez himself, have manipulated comments, upvotes, and posts in order to get communities that they disliked quarantined or banned.
I’d recommend having trust that the people we want to have over on Lemmy will look beyond a post on its competitor’s website for fair and accurate information.
Just took at some of those threads. IMHO, some of them are pretty fair.
The top thread is asking Ruud to pause lemmy.world signups to encourage people to use other instances. That doesn’t sound unreasonable.
