That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
What do you propose? Lemmy is significanly more difficult to understand, sign up for, and use, with far less content than Reddit. And the majority opinion seems to be ‘fuck those kids that don’t understand how to use lemmy, we don’t need them’.
“Significantly more difficult” is quite an exaggeration. They throw a lot of jargon at you when describing what Lemmy is and how it all works; but it’s pretty much the same as Reddit in how it’s presented and how to find things. The biggest difference, really, is instances. Communities are like subreddits, but instances are like… Alternate dimensions of the same site. And yet you can still see those dimensions from each other if the instance admins don’t block things, and you can even continue to post and comment as if they were the same thing, making it something you don’t even have to worry about.
The content will come with enough seed users adding their own content, which this migration may just be able to do.
And the majority opinion seems to be ‘fuck those kids that don’t understand how to use lemmy, we don’t need them’.
I see that too. I suspect that will go away with time. Possibly not very much time tbh. You often see that sort of attitude when a community based around new software is very small and new as culturally it is heavily influenced by people either involved in development or who pride themselves on being early adopters. Neither group is usually very good at understanding the significance of the barriers to entry for most people. Right now we’re seeing an influx of people who couldn’t care in the slightest about poking at new technology, but who are willing to do so because they want to explore a valid alternative to Reddit. That influx will naturally shift the culture and I’m pretty confident that going forward the general vibe will be that accessibility is an important thing (especially as blowing up accessibility for no good reason is at the core of why a lot of the new people are leaving Reddit.)
I disagree that it was harder to sign up for. At least on Lemmy.World (which I’m confident will become the default instance over Lemmy.ml) you just put in a username, email address and password and you’re in.
It does have far less content than Reddit. However, it is largely more active users who create and moderate content who are moving over. It’ll take time but they will grow the communities into places with a lot to offer new users. By the time that happens, it’s likely Reddit will do something to upset and displace their users again and they’ll find growing and thriving communities with increasingly compelling content to greet them. (and hopefully, even if Lemmy hasn’t become much easier to understand by then, the explanations and the guides and all the other “welcome new person” stuff will be more evolved by then.)
undefined> I disagree that it was harder to sign up for.
You are correct, and I misspoke. By ‘harder to sign up for’ I was referring to not just the actual sign up process, but the steps involved before the actual sign-up process (deciding on an instance, which itself requires learning what instance means, and doing research to find out the differences between instances are).
I think as more powerful apps are created with simple sign up UIs that auto subscribe to the communities you request etc, and pull content from multiple sources (kbin/Lemmy/mastodon) all on one page… It will become easier for the less technically inclined to join. Just give it time and keep participating here instead of reddit.
I think it is very much a case of developers building, or expanding apps. It’s easy to forget that many of these apps are in their developments infancy, because so (technically speaking) is the server software.
There will also, inevitably, be an interplay between app developer and server developer. Work arounds producing accepted items that other apps need to include (for those that remember, think text colour codes on IRC, mostly driven by mIRC (short have history, YMMV, etc etc)
Mind you, I’m wondering if all this federation will bring people back to IRC…
A big part of the problem solves itself with a larger userbase. More content generated, more exposure, search engines show lemmy instances in results, people learn. Lemmy is not that hard to undestand. You can join an instance and explore from there, maybe stay within you instance and be satisfied by your experience. Maybe you’ll learn in time about other communities in other instances. When I first joined reddit 10 years ago I didn’t understand it either but I kept using it because it was interesting. What I propose is that we keep making content and commenting and that will attract more people and communities will grow.
