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.
I feel like most successful social networks tend to have grown a bit like that tbh.
You get the super techy early adopters, then you get the tech enthusiasts, then you get the regular tech literate and finally the network effect is strong enough to get everyone else remotely interested to sign up.
I’d say that also probably correlates to an inverted progression of people willing to put up with bugs, missing functionality and perhaps a bit more of a wild west as people figure out how they’re going to interact with the network and the people on it.
The demographics of Reddit from 15 years ago were nothing like on Reddit 5 years ago and those are nothing like that which make up Reddit today.
Lemmy is a fantastic reminder of what Reddit used to be like. There’s something relaxing and fulfilling about being surrounded by like-minded individuals who are here for good. Once it becomes too large and easy to navigate, you get flooded with trolls and creeps. I honestly don’t care what happens to reddit at this point. The blackout and upcoming loss of third-party apps has converted me to Lemmy for the foreseeable future.
100% this, and it’s why I still used old.reddit.com, because the new reddit site is just awful.
What I will say is there is less “noise” on our lemmy/discussion forums, and distinctly higher quality posts. This is something we’d like to encourage long term, particularly when people ask questions already answered quite clearly on our website.