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Are anti-Lemmy sentiments being botted? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago by tehmics@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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In other places on around the web, (chiefly /r/RedditAlternatives) whenever Lemmy is brought up, invariably I see the exact same complaints from brand new accounts.

Lemmy is too complicated, it wont gain traction, can't figure out how to use it, can't log in, etc.

Now, I'm definitely more tech savvy than the average redditor, but I just don't see the complaints. You can go to any Lemmy site, instantly start doomscrolling with a familiar UI, and sign up on all the instances I've tried has been frankly more simple than making a new reddit account. The only real complaint I have is the generally smaller volume of users and posts.

My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.

Ideally, the first link someone sees when googling Lemmy would be a global feed on a fairly generic instance, with a basic tagline akin to 'front page of the internet.' End users don't need to care about the technical details, at least not until they're interested in the platform.

So is this "Lemmy is too confusing" sentiment even real? And if not, what motive would there be to astroturf this?

If it is a real issue affecting would-be users, how can we address it?

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[–] tehmics@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Realistically the solution would be instances moving away from the Lemmy 'brand'. You could more easily direct users to a specific one and fast track newbies past all the fediverse details.

If we go with the email analogy, people rarely ever search for 'email', they just go to the specific ones they know. Then searching for lemmy gets you to places like join-lemmy.org that cares about the ecosystem, while terms analogous to gmail directs you more to a specific instance.

And I think this sort of branding model actually more compatible with the idea of decentralization. As a culture, I think we would better serve federation by directly linking and promoting our preferred instances, rather than harping on about federation and the lemmyverse.

[–] dan@upvote.au 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Realistically the solution would be instances moving away from the Lemmy 'brand'

This is a great idea, and I think some instances do this. I seem to remember Beehaw taking this approach. Similar to forums - each forum has a different name even if they use the same software.

The tricky part for regular users to understand is that if they sign up on one server, they can still access content on others. Old-school internet users that used to use Usenet would understand it (Usenet functioned the same way) but the majority of users are used to centralized services these days, which makes it hard.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

If we go with the email analogy, people rarely ever search for 'email', they just go to the specific ones they know.

I get it, but everyone going to gmail is not a good thing and never has been. The paradigm shift is more meaningful than simply growing lemmy as a community. Without that, the only difference from a mainstream social network today would be a handful of big players rather than just one.