Was there even a mass exodus? I largely avoid Reddit now, but I do kind of doubt that they’ve been hurt in any meaningful way by all the protests and people leaving…
I think the problem is, Lemmy’s greatest strength (Fediverse) is also the thing that’s going to hold back a mass migration at this point in time. Onboarding with Reddit is a breeze. You make an account, it asks you what your interests are and location based communities and you’re off to the races. Every community on reddit is immediately available to interact with.
When I came to lemmy I almost gave up on my initial onboarding and I’m a pretty tech savvy guy. I didn’t know where to go to start. There’s all these different lemmy sites and I didn’t know if they were the same thing or different and if I was signing up to the right one. Account creation failed initially without giving an error message (I’ll chalk that one up to just a bug). There didn’t seem to be any NSFW communities until I figured out the instance thing. You’re told you can use your account across instances but when you go to another instance via it’s domain you can’t interact with it, you have to get to another instance through your instance which is confusing as a newcomer. Any one of these issues is a falling off point for a less inclined visitor.
I’m not saying the fediverse thing is bad but the unfortunate byproduct of it is a difficult experience for newcomers, especially when you compare it to Reddit. I’m hoping growth in the community will bring in talent to solve for this initial experience or possibly apps which can handle all of this more seamlessly.
I wonder if federated instances are something that can just become cultural knowledge over time, like any other technical piece of software. To a degree using reddit is like that to newcomers with it’s unique thread style and “independently” moderated subs. Lemmy just took it to another level.
You joined almost a month back, those were rough times. Today is much better.
Today I would just tell people
- Go to lemmy.world (even old.lemmy.world if they like that interface)
- Lurk for a while
- When you want to create an account, do it in LW. You will be able to move it later on.
That’s pretty much it.
I had pretty much the same experience migrating from Reddit to Lemmy and I still don’t entirely understand how this thing works.
I’m still trying to figure out if I need to make an account on each Lemmy instance to reserve my username, since this is already my second account after fmhy.ml stopped working.
