TLDR: the article says , lemmy is confusing , too broken and kinda unusable coz servers run on whims.
While I have been active here since a month now , I have had nothing but only a positive experience on lemmy , what about you guys ?
While I do agree lemmy adds a layer or two of complexity compared to the simple “plug-and-play” reddit model, the article comes across as blaming all of the author’s lemmy-related issues on the software rather than admitting he just doesn’t understand how to use it.
Unlike Reddit’s approach of categorization using subreddits, Lemmy instances are mostly entire servers that act as catch-all versions of subreddits.
This is one example. Subreddits =/= instances. A more apt comparison would be communities, and then he can point out how communities are hosted by different instances. I mean, how did he miss that?
Another one is when he said there was no visual representation of “All” and “Local”. Just one look at an instance’s page shows you those options quite clearly.
Try as I might, I missed the curation and consolidation of Reddit, where content is batched up into similar topics.
Wait… What? That’s kind of exactly what’s happening in lemmy communities.
I may be biased, but despite lemmy’s many shortcomings/growing pains I feel the author should have acquired at least a basic understanding of how all this works before writing an article that points out “problems” when there is none.
Edit: I’m on mobile so it’s hard to quote every single line. But there were more than a few mistakes there.
Thats exactly what I thought , there are a bun of me issues with the author and seems like he has not even tried to get to understand lemmy,
I mean… What? That’s kind of exactly what’s happening in lemmy communities
Indeed I can understand this one. I’m really liking Lemmy but discoverability is pretty bad, add the fact the ranking is shit and pretty useless in suggesting interesting content and you will understand his point.
Reddit has both much more content and not only a better ranking system but also a functioning personalized algorithm, if you want to use it.
To this day, all of the non mainstream Lemmy communities I’m following it’s because I’ve used to follow the subreddit and it migrated here.
Oh definitely. There are many things that lemmy needs to work on. It’s nowhere near as stable as reddit as it stands.
But the author was pointing out how reddit is better since it sorts topics by subreddits, implying that lemmy doesn’t do that (which is absolutely false).
As far as discovery and amount of content, I fully agree. Reddit just has much more users than lemmy. There’s no argument. Discoverability is also another aspect I’d love to be improved on in lemmy. If you’re in a small/new instance, you probably won’t see a ton of communities compared to a bigger one.
I’m pretty optimistic, though. I think we’re just getting started.
I think we’re just getting started.
Yeah of course, we need to remember Lemmy is not even out of beta yet. But people don’t really care, they try it once and if the user experience isn’t at the level of competitors they simply won’t use it unless there’s a philosophical rationale (for example decentralization, but many don’t care at all). That’s why I’m so happy many developers with great UX experience like Sync are approaching the platform
The many instances and multiples of the same communities across all instances would absolutely be confusing to your average joe. But, once you start using Lemmy you realize understanding all that doesn’t matter and it just works. As for the stability thing… A fediverse of new communities based on open source software has growing pains? Gasp… The article reads like that person is truly unaware of how software works in the beginning.
Lemmy tell you, the article was from 16 June which was before many of the recent updates and the flurry of app development.
Article summary:
Reddit, a popular online platform for discussions and news, has recently faced issues with increased API pricing and moderator-led shutdowns. As a result, users have been exploring alternatives such as Lemmy. Lemmy is a federated social platform that allows independent servers to communicate with each other. However, the user experience on Lemmy can be confusing, as it lacks the categorization and consolidation of Reddit. Additionally, the decentralized nature of Lemmy makes it difficult to discover niche interests and results in frequent server issues. The federated platforms also struggle with real-time message synchronization. Overall, Lemmy is still in its early stages and lacks the polish, diversity of content, and ease of access needed to compete with Reddit. Unless significant efforts are made to simplify the platform for average users, it is unlikely to gain widespread traction.
Beep boop, I’m a human and I summarized the article using a custom implementation of the gpt-3.5-turbo LLM model
New to Lemmy and not a huge reddit user in the past and to me both are exactly the same amount of confusing (i.e. a bit).
I havent been a reddit user in the past , except lemmy is much more positive i felt
UI is still a bit weird. I enjoy Lemmy but linking or getting back to the context of a comment is still not possible (on Firefox/Chrome)
Since the twitter migration, mainstream media has had a pretty bad bias against the fediverse. I wouldn’t listen to anything from the media about any fediverse platform because they’re either driving at a preconceived critique (usually it’s too hard or unstable), or, don’t understand it … and I’m the sort of person that is very willing to critique the shit of the fediverse.
As to why there’s such a bias … probably a confluence of a few factors:
- Mainstream media doesn’t support actual journalism. So any article is probably written by someone on a tight deadline without enough time to actually understand the fediverse or even the will to do so.
- Mainstream media has had a cozy relationship with big-social, especially twitter (and facebook?), and generally feel like mass engagement based platforms are necessary for their business … and so the fediverse is, on some level, basically a threat to their livelihood.
- Going further … any form of media that is essentially non-profit and self-organised or hosted is probably a threat to mass media’s perceived livelihood, so even on an ideological basis, the core of the fediverse is something between dangerous, value-less or dumb. Therefore, any friction or tradeoff is almost immediately fatal to them.
How is lemmy confusing? Unless they mean how it works, it looks to me like a standard interface. Sounds like they don’t really know what it is.
