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?
The first step is completely different from anything else you’ve ever done
“Pick an instance to sign up for”
This does not compute. What is an instance? Why do I have to pick? Which one should I pick? Compared to
“Create an account at reddit.com” makes sense and is something everyone has done before.
It doesn’t matter how simple the answers to those questions are, the fact that the very first step requires multiple explanations is huge, and will always be a barrier to entry.
This isn’t really true, you already had to do this for email. Never heard of that being a barrier of entry.
My parents prefer to opt for local privacy/security focused email providers, while I go with gmail for the feature set and design. But I used to try out a few different ones to figure out which one works best for me. Still use a hotmail email for my Windows account.
I fail to see how this is different to the situation with lemmy/kbin instances.
99.9% of people just use gmail, and before that 99.9% used hotmail, etc. There’s always been ‘the one’ that effectively everyone is on.
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You’re describing an internet that doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t for decades.
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Even a low barrier to entry tends to significantly improve the signal-to-noise ratio in discussions.
So, I’m fine with people that can’t get past making a simple, almost irrelevant, decision as step 1 of gaining access… not gaining access.