Hey everyone, I’m honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that’s because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it’s safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I’d been a Reddit user since 2010 so I’ve witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel–less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.
That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There’s other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a ‘chatroom’ versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, ‘visit site–post to site–view content on site’.
Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far–hope to see it grow!
Not once there’s a more feature rich app. Seriously, that’s all it will take. My wife is as “mainstream” as it gets, and her only objections to, trying lemmy as a whole is that the ux sucks in browsers and the only two apps that are really available lack features that should be there (like the links on jerboa not going to the right place), and little things like being able to organize subscriptions or do an in-app “multi”.
My sister said pretty much the same thing. Out of my main group of friends, none are exactly “into” things like this, and only one said he’d never bother with it at all (and he hated reddit long before anyway). These are fairly casual users of social media of any kind, they aren’t power users, they’re the average joe. I was able to explain to them exactly how to use lemmy in less than five minutes.
The only other objection that wasn’t more of an app thing is the signup delay. That’s a bigger barrier to entry than anything else, and it isn’t something a friendly user can help with, unlike finding new communities or how to navigate.