I understand that…the average person is not going to. Also, you EXPLAINED it to someone (I also explained it to my wife, who is not a tech person at all, and she understood fine), but again, it takes explaining. For this to take off, it’s going to need to be accessible without a lot of explanation. Otherwise people just won’t care.
It will absolutely.
The average non-tech savvy person will be extremely confused about how federated services operate. You say “join lemmy’, and they say, 'ok, what’s the site?” and then you need to explain, well, you need to pick one of about four thousand instances, and then only go there when you want to sign in. Now they’re already confused. That can then be explained 'It’s like e-mail, lots of different servers to get email, but they all work together." But this doesn’t hit as well because a website is not e-mail, and so interconnected websites are not immediately intuitive. And as soon as you start going into any level of technical details, the average person just tunes out and decides “I don’t want to deal with this crap.”
If they pick an instance (Like Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works) that allows free signup, they won’t have too much of a problem. If they pick one that has questions to answer and then a manual approval process that is COMPLETELY opaque, they will nope the fuck out immediately and not even bother to find other instances. Heck, I was turned off of Lemmy for several days because of this, and I’m very tech savvy, and have been doing this sort of crap forever. I signed up first at Lemmy.one, which eventually got my login active, but took 3 days. When I saw no indication of that signup working, though, I tried Beehaw. That STILL has not been activated and it’s been 5 or 6 days, and of course, there’s no indication of what’s going on during that time…it’s just a spinning wheel. Not until I went to an instance that didn’t have these ridiculous manual approvals did I begin using Lemmy. The average user is not going to bother with that.
These are going to be the biggest things that hold Lemmy back (there are also some serious usability issues with the main feed, concerning repeat posts showing for DAYS, and the autorefresh everywhere, which pushes content down constantly if you’re in the New feed).
It will absolutely.
The average non-tech savvy person will be extremely confused about how federated services operate. You say “join lemmy’, and they say, 'ok, what’s the site?” and then you need to explain, well, you need to pick one of about four thousand instances, and then only go there when you want to sign in. Now they’re already confused. That can then be explained 'It’s like e-mail, lots of different servers to get email, but they all work together." But this doesn’t hit as well because a website is not e-mail, and so interconnected websites are not immediately intuitive. And as soon as you start going into any level of technical details, the average person just tunes out and decides “I don’t want to deal with this crap.”
If they pick an instance (Like Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works) that allows free signup, they won’t have too much of a problem. If they pick one that has questions to answer and then a manual approval process that is COMPLETELY opaque, they will nope the fuck out immediately and not even bother to find other instances. Heck, I was turned off of Lemmy for several days because of this, and I’m very tech savvy, and have been doing this sort of crap forever. I signed up first at Lemmy.one, which eventually got my login active, but took 3 days. When I saw no indication of that signup working, though, I tried Beehaw. That STILL has not been activated and it’s been 5 or 6 days, and of course, there’s no indication of what’s going on during that time…it’s just a spinning wheel. Not until I went to an instance that didn’t have these ridiculous manual approvals did I begin using Lemmy. The average user is not going to bother with that.
These are going to be the biggest things that hold Lemmy back (there are also some serious usability issues with the main feed, concerning repeat posts showing for DAYS, and the autorefresh everywhere, which pushes content down constantly if you’re in the New feed).
Wow, they’d even take back a goal!
Come on, Florida, pull the goalie for the rest of the game!
Guys I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Vegas takes it tonight.
Jabroa isn’t fully fleshed out yet either, but it does at least have a more complete feature set at the momeent. It’s mostly usable for day to day Lemmy browsing. Mlem isn’t there yet. Sounds like the dev is making great strides, so hopefully soon.
Maybe not…there is no place for me to see subbed communities, nor to search within the app. I’m using version 0.0.6, which appears to be the latest in TestFlight. Until the development gets a little further, I’m just sticking with a pinned web app.
I agree somewhat when it comes to the giant subreddits, but the best thing about Reddit is that there were vibrant communities around an absolutely high variety of interests. Some of those communities were reasonably sized, but provided excellent discussion. On a smaller service like Lemmy, those small communities become ghost towns, with 1-2 people in there, and that’s not fun at all.
I agree that coming on as a mod would be undesirable in this climate, but I do think a lot of us as part of the protest have a bit of a blind spot. Reddit may be hurt from this, and they may slowly start losing users, especially if Lemmy or another good alternative start taking off, but let’s be a little realistic here. Lemmy has a total user base of around 112,000 people as of yesterday, though I’m sure a fair few of these accounts are the same person (I have 3 Lemmy accounts on three instances). Reddit has over 50 million daily users. (Lemmy’s active monthly user count is around 15,000 right now). Reddit’s monthly user count is 1.6 BILLION. If Reddit is ‘dying’, Lemmy has been dead and buried. (Yes, I know one is growing and one is shrinking this week, but it’s a little naive to think that will definitely stay that way.)
Could Reddit eventually die and an alternative rise in its place? Certainly, but it’s going to be a couple years off.
I’m also posting this from Mlem. What works works pretty well, but it is obviously still in beta for a reason, and the biggest reason is that it is missing some major things that make day to day use very difficult. It is missing ability to see your subscribed communities unless you favorited them. It is missing the ability to search for communities, and to see anything you’ve already posted (your profile) or if you have a notification or reply. (Oh, and the ability to edit your posts…I saw a typo in this and had to go to the web version to fix it). All of those core features need to be added pretty quickly.
Jerboa on Android is not perfect either but it is much further along in development at this stage.
Jerboa is a pretty nice app overall already. I use an iPhone as my main device, and Mlem is very incomplete at this stage (but it’s quite new). I loaded up Jerboa on a Pixel, though l, and was very impressed. Jerboa is far more polished…shame it’s Android only
What do you mean one is defederated from the other? I’m on lemmy.world and can see all beehaw communities just fine.