Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt.
Is Lemmy buggy as heck? Absolutely.
But I don’t think that really justifies a lot of the comments I’m seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that it’s hard to figure out. The front page feed and sort options are very similar to Reddit. Searching for same-instance communities is not too difficult. Posting, commenting, and voting are all quite intuitive. What’s the problem?
You way overestimate the tech literacy of the average Joe or Susie.
That seems to be what basically every person is doing lately. They act like there is no difference between Lemmy and Reddit. Sure, signing up is easy. But understanding subscriptions is a different situation entirely.
I suspect in the next 6 months or so Lemmy is going to see a bunch of UI improvements as more open source devs learn about the project. It’s similar to the UI of Reddit 7-8 years ago, but I’m in the minority of remembering what Reddit was before it became https://old.
It feels unrealistic to expect a small platform that blew up, not ready to scale to be as polished as something built by a large paid organization right of the bat.
Exactly. There’s a reason Apple products are so successful. Apple does a fantastic job of hiding away unnecessary details and giving users a very slick, polished interface that usually does what they want. I’m not even a person who buys any Apple products.
That’s why I’m asking about this. What am I missing here that’s supposed to be making it difficult?
How to find the established community you want to be involved in.
And humblebragging.