Hey everyone, I’m honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that’s because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it’s safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I’d been a Reddit user since 2010 so I’ve witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel–less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.
That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There’s other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a ‘chatroom’ versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, ‘visit site–post to site–view content on site’.
Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far–hope to see it grow!
I think it can be initially, because it sounds confusing, but I personally feel fairly confident after poking around consistently after a couple of days, that was the amount of time it took for me with reddit all those years ago as well, I believe. Once you figure out how to get to other federations and look up things there, things just run nicely, as long as you’re into the old reddit/old internet forums look. Honestly, I found figuring out cross federations in mastodon is way harder, and they’re doing it.
But I don’t think it will be on the long run to most people once they acclimatise. I’m using both Jerboa and the browser and when I search for new communities to join or look up what’s going on on All neither feels like a confusing alien experience. The only part of it that feels weird about it is that after so many years, I very rarely had a need or a desire to use reddit’s all, so feels a bit odd.