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?
What these people are really saying is that it’s not really bad enough on Reddit for them to migrate.
And you know what? Fair enough, that’s a perfectly valid position to take, and we should respect that descision. Not everyone sees a third party app as all that necessary, and many are happy to scroll through promoted posts. It’s not for other people to decide how you get to enjoy a product, after all.
Of course, many of us who have left have clued in that Reddit is not the product, Reddit is a cage to hold the product: Redditors; that the user experience on Reddit will only continue to decline as it inevitably does with the enshitification business model. Meanwhile Lemmy will continue to improve.
You can’t save people from themselves. Some people are so entrenched they will stay to the bitter end. The cost benefit of jumping ship from one platform to another is going to be different for everyone, it’s going to change as Reddit pushes monetisation and community projects focus on features to attract users, and you have to accept that.
Agreed. While I am more favourable to platforms like Lemmy and Kbin on a more or less ideological level (I hate how the internet is essentially five companies in a trench coat at this point, all using user generated content and data for their own profits), Reddit as an experience isn’t terrible enough for me to throw it away yet (or at least, these sites can’t replicate what I’m looking for well enough to make me commit to jumping ship just yet).
I’m glad these platforms are getting a lot more attention, I’m glad to see them grow and mature (both in terms of userbase, but as well as functionality), and I want them to succeed. However, once the dust from the blackout has settled (most of the subs I normally visited are still private, which I fully support), I will probably jump back to Reddit until the restless march towards enshitification strikes once again, and I leave the platform more or less for good (with these platforms at the top of the list of alternatives for me to return to).
This space also just isn’t mature enough for a lot of people. The federated nature of things makes young sites and young communities, uh, confusing for some. That really fades away when the influx stabalizes and growth curves become shallow and predictable.
It’ll grow, and develop its own culture, and become a reliable and solid alternative to Reddit. Right now, it’s both a gamble for people, and also somewhere they can view as “stealing” something from them.
There are a ton of places that want to be the next reddit and everyone is trying to get everyone else to migrate to their platform.
None are ready yet and each have concerns. Lemmy, Kbin, and fediverse platforms have been dominating a lot of the discussion but they aren’t Reddit and they probably never will be (especially not by July 1st).
You have a lot of confusion and frustration that there just isn’t another Reddit out there yet. To all those I say that Reddit didn’t happen overnight and it’s all going to take time.
Well, people are looking for a exact replica of Reddit, with all of its fleshed out functionality and even content. They also want one monolithic app that can host every piece of information and every user ever on the same website. FOMO is real. However, it seems like most people don’t understand that these new alternative websites will need time to be fleshed out technically and that to be able to do what Reddit does requires huge infrastructure and a way to afford that infrastructure. As long as the goal is corporate gains, we will never find that magical unicorn that will always make decisions based on users / general publics interest. What if we moved over to Squabbles? How long will Squabbles be able to afford itself until it gets big enough and makes the same changes that Reddit does / did?
Despite all of it’s downfalls, that’s where Federation really shines. Almost all Lemmy / Kbin servers are currently running at a personal hobby levels of investment (except the biggest instances) and the big instances are struggling with the demand because new users (me included when I opened up my account) are naturally choosing the biggest instances to sign up out of FOMO or fear of losing their accounts in the future.
Lemmy / Kbin and even the federation itself is not ready for general mass consumer. There will be growing pains, and lots of it. However, good thing about open source software, as long as there are people willing to populate these websites and generate content, we will always have people willing to contribute on the technical side of things as well. I truly believe if we can keep the federation alive, it will come to a point where it will be ready for the general consumer. We, the early adapters, in my humble opinion, should manage our expectations. We will not kill Reddit but we don’t need to. We just need to keep Lemmy / Kbin / Mastodon and the federation alive.
When I joined reddit (migrating from Imgur, I know, I know) I didn’t get how it worked either. Before that I migrated from another platform, and before that I migrated from another platform. Its been the same each and every time.
Once you just start using it and it becomes your new reality, the days of the previous platform feel distant.that subreddit naturally has a pessimistic tone because they’re all sick of reddit, but haven’t felt that the alternatives presented are worth switching to. Lemmy has been posted on there a few times, and I myself was dismissive of it (and still now I do not use lemmy). kbin had what I wanted though, so I commented such on that subreddit and now here I am.
different people have different needs. sometimes, the alternative just isn’t active enough to really be worth switching to (no one else is joining you). other times the ui might be clunky or weird or not something you like. the fediverse concept is a bit difficult for non-technical people. Though I think kbin’s federation downtime kinda helped mitigate that for a lot of us (and there was a lot of educating here on kbin about what that was all about). for kbin you just join kbin. but lemmy it’s a bit daunting with all the instances.
Lemmy suffers for the tankie sentiments (i.e. pro-Putin and pro-CCP) of the founder and major instances. Kbin has the benefits of Lemmy without those drawbacks.
What are people promoting right now if not Lemmy?
kbin.social is mentioned a few times on that sub’s submission titles currently.
Some are promoting tilde or other centralised solutions that will have the same issue of Reddit sooner or later
I feel like I need to type out a full thesis paper in order to fit in with the type over on Tildes.
