I mean, almost all social media has a learning curve but Lemmy is one that if you don’t put in the effort you’re not going to learn it and use it. It’s not seamless to master.

Design for it is an offshoot of what developers made that work for them. There’s a gap between that and what the lay person who grew up with phone apps are willing to put up with.

I know Lemmy will grow and develop. But there’s going to be a bleed off of active users from these waves of new members. I’m hoping that the communities grow fast and that the phone app is designed with the average high school kid or octogenarian in mind.

If I wasn’t a kid who grew up figuring out driver issues or the blue screen of death in Windows all of the time I may have moved on after my first couple of hours with Lemmy.

Truly. I want to see the platform grow and flourish. But it has some hurdles.

  • @[email protected]English
    11•2 years ago

    Welcome to anything that isn’t mainstream.
    Altough I’ve had this talk with some people and I have to agree, most projects that are open source, foss, federated, selfhosted and such… are either cumbersome, requiere technical know-how, are complex (either to use, setup or update), think that command-line is good for everyone or have no users (or the userbase is questionable [and I don’t mean porn, I mean like voats was]).
    Centralized services just work, that’s how you get the approval of people willing to try (without technical knowledge) and without the money to buy servers or upgrades.

    The rest will follow influencers, brands/products or goverment accounts, so we’re pretty much at lost there.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•2 years ago

      The rest will follow influencers, brands/products or goverment accounts, so we’re pretty much at lost there.

      I think this is the key takeaway with every argument made in this way. People follow content, the content is the actual thing people use any of these services for. People today still use IRC and Usernet. Obviously we don’t want systems to be ridiculously complex, but if the “goal” is to be mainstream then this project is total waste of time. Thankfully that isn’t the goal, and the fediverse, I feel, has already proven to be successful. It’s different, and its differences are why people use it.