I told somebody I know who knew about Reddit’s API changes about Lemmy. He has a master’s degree in Computer Science and works as a software engineer. But then, he told me that it’s too confusing to get into, even for someone like him. This is great feedback and I hope that these issues will be fixed in the coming months.
It’s weird to me that so many people have a hard time figuring out Lemmy; honestly for the average user, the process is:
- Join big instance
- Browse and search from there
Searching for communities could use a bit of work to make it easier (for example, I shouldn’t have to have the full community link to search for one from a federated instance if nobody on my instance has subscribed; why aren’t community lists updated automatically?) but the basic experience is pretty easy to get into
@fediverse
@rozno @SuperSpruce
Choosing a server is often the hardest step. That’s why you should send the signup page of your fav instance to your friends and not the official lemmy page.
I think your friend just doesn’t want to put in 5 minutes of effort. And honestly, that’s fine. I think the average reddittor has been kind of trending that way for a while, and I wish him the best of luck hanging out with people who can’t be assed to put in 5 minutes to figure anything out. I might be wrong, but especially for technical content I think the mean will drop much further on reddit.
I agree that it sounds like your friend doesn’t want to put in the effort. But he’s right on a couple points. Lemmy is easy to learn and use, but that fact that you have to learn at all will scare most people away. People are used to immediate gratification. Sign up, maybe fill out a 2 sec questionnaire for your interests, enjoy. Lemmy isn’t streamlined to that level yet.
