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?
Cynicism? On Reddit!?
In seriousness, I think it’s a mix of things. There’s survivorship bias–some number of Lemmy posters (me, for example) have left, never to return. So we’re not in r/RedditAlternatives speaking in favor of Lemmy. Some of it’s frustration over this whole situation. It is very unfortunate things went down this way. And there’s legitimate criticism too. Lemmy’s got quite a bit growing and maturing to do before it could get anywhere near the size and breadth of Reddit.
But it’s also important to realize Lemmy is not going to be a clone of Reddit. It’s not trying to and it wouldn’t succeed if it did. No one thing is going to replace Reddit for everybody. Personally, I think that’s a big plus. There’s value in a smaller community. I like that Lemmy is decentralized by design but there also needs to be more diversity on the Internet in general. Some communities will be better served by spinning up their own message boards, going to different sites and experimenting with different formats. Quite a few are going to stay on Reddit and probably thrive for years to come. And that’s fantastic, that’s what we should’ve been doing all along.
Singular, monolithic solutions are the real problem, imo.
This is important. I’ve mentioned it before. There are probably levels of people: and those that straight up quit, are no longer a voice on Reddit. You could go back with a goal to draw people away, but I think it’s also valid to let things play out their course. I’m still missing some subreddits I went to, especially those where I lurked rather than posted. I can live with that loss. I don’t use Twitter any more and I didn’t replace that with anything. I’m sure my life will go on without some replacement subreddits for now.