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?

  • Kichae@kbin.social
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    2 years ago

    Discoverability is always a problem when in a period of new instances spinning up. There are some solvable issues around community discovery once federation had been established, but scaling up periods are just janky due to the lack of a central source of truth.

    Things will get go much smoother once it’s clear that we’re not just all going to go back to Reddit. Periods of organic growth are really nice.

    But yeah, the UI on both Lemmy and kbin need work