For a sub that’s supposed to promote Reddit alternatives, there sure is a lot of pessimism on there. I see so many people dismissing Lemmy and kbin already for being too inaccessible, the UI is clunky, it’s hard to pick up etc and saying these sites will never take off. But why? Of course a platform in its infancy will have hurdles to overcome, and it takes time for devs to implement all the QOL features to make the site more intuitive. And when I see people trying to explain how Lemmy works, people just respond “Too complicated, I’m not reading all that etc.”
Do people expect a fully functional Reddit clone with all the same features to conveniently exist somewhere they can hop to? Do people not realise that Reddit itself was just as confusing when users migrated from Digg all those years ago? Do they not realise sites take time to mature?
RedditAlternatives is the only subreddit I still use because I want to help people make the jump, but it’s kinda disheartening seeing the attitudes there. Anyone has a more optimistic take on this?
What these people are really saying is that it’s not really bad enough on Reddit for them to migrate.
And you know what? Fair enough, that’s a perfectly valid position to take, and we should respect that descision. Not everyone sees a third party app as all that necessary, and many are happy to scroll through promoted posts. It’s not for other people to decide how you get to enjoy a product, after all.
Of course, many of us who have left have clued in that Reddit is not the product, Reddit is a cage to hold the product: Redditors; that the user experience on Reddit will only continue to decline as it inevitably does with the enshitification business model. Meanwhile Lemmy will continue to improve.
You can’t save people from themselves. Some people are so entrenched they will stay to the bitter end. The cost benefit of jumping ship from one platform to another is going to be different for everyone, it’s going to change as Reddit pushes monetisation and community projects focus on features to attract users, and you have to accept that.
This space also just isn’t mature enough for a lot of people. The federated nature of things makes young sites and young communities, uh, confusing for some. That really fades away when the influx stabalizes and growth curves become shallow and predictable.
It’ll grow, and develop its own culture, and become a reliable and solid alternative to Reddit. Right now, it’s both a gamble for people, and also somewhere they can view as “stealing” something from them.