r/Lemmy right now is full of posts basically talking about how bad Lemmy is handling right now.
It’s a bad look and will probably hurt the migration.
I know we are moving off of Reddit but the Lemmy subreddit needs some positivity for people looking to migrate
In the midst of wading through a sea of people talking about Lemmy admins being tankies and other (mostly untrue) propaganda about the platform, the most legit criticism I’ve heard about Lemmy has honestly been from my older brother.
We had a conversation about Reddit alternatives given the recent news, and his honest take was “I don’t give a fuck about federation. Just give me something that works!”
This is very much one of the biggest problems with Lemmy. Most people don’t want to figure out federation and how it works before they make an account. Part of the reason Lemmy.world is so popular is that it’s presented as the default in a lot of places, and most people don’t want to deviate from the defaults
That’s pretty much how I wound up here. In the initial phase of googling, I didn’t find a very good breakdown of which instances of communities were good candidates for a new user, so I went with the popular one.
I made a kbin as well, but I can’t log into Jerboa with that.
It’d be helpful if there was a flow chart or something directing new users, starting with pointing then toward things like Lemmy vs Mastodon vs Beehaw etc and ending with a specific instance that aligns with that user’s interests.
The official Lemmy website is a pile of steaming poo too, which is the first thing I looked at. It looks amateur and the way the recommended instances list reads and looks isn’t very reassuring at all.
It looks like they’ve made some changes but it still looks like an impenetrable thing for nerds rather than the new wave of social media.
Uh oh. The guides I read said the instance doesn’t matter, just pick one! Then you subscribe to communities from any instance you stumble across to build up your “page” of stuff to consume. Is that not what we’re doing? I thought I had this worked out haha
Yeah that was the advice I found too, but from what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think I agree with it. My initial fed account was on kbin, and I very quickly ran into the issue that I couldn’t use Jerboa because of that, cuz Jerboa is made specifically for Lemmy and requires a Lemmy login.
There was some drama going on with an instance called exploding.heads right when I joined – apparently they were a bunch of neonazis and Lemmy (or kbin? idr) decided to defederate with them, cuz fuck Nazis. So, definitely glad I didn’t just random click over there initially and start my account there.
There’s also lemmygrad.ml, which from what I’ve seen so far are a bunch of Putin apologists. Unsure if they’re defederated - feel like I saw them a lot initially and not so much anymore, but they’re basically the left wing equivalent to exploding.heads.
There’s a NSFW instance, there’s a bunch of language-specific instance, …you get the point.
Where you start your account will 100% influence your experience with the fediverse, and that isn’t very well acknowledged on any guides I saw for new user orientation.
for real, for most people in the end all that is going to matter is that it works