Not enough people here (it’s a network effect) and it’s way too complex to sign up.
My signup process was like this:
After going through the list of servers, I had to pick one of them. As someone who went through that whole situation with XMPP, I know that this alone is enough to make most people turn away.
Then I picked beehaw, because most of the communities I wanted to join were there. The signup form turned out to be an application form. I spent about an hour mulling over what to write there.
Since the page told me that if I didn’t hear anything back after 24h, I could consider my application rejected, I wrote another account application at feddit.de after waiting for about 48h.
The feddit.de account was approved, but I only noticed by my login working a few days later. I didn’t get any notification. That’s what I’m using right now.
After more than a week, I got an email that my beehaw application was accepted.
I don’t know anybody with even half as much patience as myself. Every single step on this way would have been a dealbreaker for a regular person by itself. Creating an account on reddit takes a minute, not a procedure of several days.
Also keep in mind that most people don’t understand what federation means in the first place.
My experience signing up involved no pain at all and I personally liked having my application screened. I had access within an hour or two, it wasn’t a complicated process and I chose beehaw because of it’s community
It seems pretty easy to understand signing up, from my perspective. The hard part is understanding how everything is connected
My exact feels. I had never heard of the fediverse or whatever, and still don’t even know if I spelled it right lol.
But I just picked the first server that had a good amount of people on it, off a recommended list, and it’s been fine.
To sign up I had to answer 3 super simple subjective questions. Took 2 mins. Had to wait to get approved, but in the meantime I could still browse so it really didn’t matter.
To me, the hard part was learning lemmy/kbin/beehaw etc existed.
All of this is fairly reasonable for the kind of project it is. Sounds like you and those users don’t understand what signing up at any site really means and you’ve been so separated by the front end, you be have no ability to show grace when basically using a website for free hosted and manages by free people what takes money donated by others?
Why is this anyone else’s fault but you? You’ve gotten spoiled. Maybe everything isn’t for you if you cannot even do the bare minimum to participate?
How do you think I came to be here if I wouldn’t be able to do the bare minimum?
I’m very well aware of how it all works on the technical side, but the basic problem is that social networks only work when there’s a large network of people connected to each other. If you’re satisfied with the maybe hundred people that are active in this community that’s great, but the whole discussion in this thread is about why Reddit can’t be replaced by Lemmy.
I’m not trying to be judgemental about the process itself, I’m just saying that all of the points I made are dealbreakers for the question of Reddit replacement.
It’s obviously not Reddit numbers, but been a lot of posts about how much lemmy/etc have grown in the last week, largely due to the Reddit fallout.
Clearly it’s not going to replace Reddit overnight, but it’s made large strides very suddenly, and can def close that gap over time. Especially for people like me who enjoyed Reddit, but were just browsers, not really power users
People are signing up, but the number of posts and comments is still very low. In my subscription feed, there’s a new post every few hours and maybe 10 comments per hour. I’ve been on local message boards with more activity than that back in the 90s.
not enough people here? lemmy instances total are close to a million and that isn’t even including kbin users
also, what you said about the sign up process is entirely because of the influx of new users right now - of course its not good UX but with the community beehaw wants to foster, they need that application and they’re 4 people accepting all of them!
be reasonable and accept that this site is young! it has not had the decade of development that reddit has behind it! things are weird and still broken and that is okay, the community adapts to its quirks
Not all of them use the application process, many are just captcha plus email. Then Beehaw is failing to send confirmation emails.
The sign up process has to incorporate security to protect the Lemmy federation from spambots and other exploitation. Yeah it’s a hassle, but it’s not there to annoy people, rather to provide the best possible user experience. But still an application is something that can dissuade a potential user. That’s why many don’t use one.
Beehaw is one of the most heavily laden instances probably second only to the originating lemmy.ml instance. An overloaded instance can result in hangs and sluggish performance. Also true for one with high latency such as one located overseas.
It’s true the chore of finding a good instance can dissuade some people. If you don’t know any better and sign up on a bad instance it can unfairly soil your opinion of the whole Lemmy federation.
Once you find an instance you like (good ping, good performance, good admin) all the content across all the instances is there, barring any defederation. Which communities are local to the instance is not normally a selection criteria.
Back then, there was an easy and viable alternative. Lemmy, sadly, is neither of those two.
I, for one, just signed up on this website specifically so I can leave reddit
Why isn’t Lemmy viable?
Not enough people here (it’s a network effect) and it’s way too complex to sign up.
My signup process was like this:
I don’t know anybody with even half as much patience as myself. Every single step on this way would have been a dealbreaker for a regular person by itself. Creating an account on reddit takes a minute, not a procedure of several days.
Also keep in mind that most people don’t understand what federation means in the first place.
My experience signing up involved no pain at all and I personally liked having my application screened. I had access within an hour or two, it wasn’t a complicated process and I chose beehaw because of it’s community
It seems pretty easy to understand signing up, from my perspective. The hard part is understanding how everything is connected
My exact feels. I had never heard of the fediverse or whatever, and still don’t even know if I spelled it right lol.
But I just picked the first server that had a good amount of people on it, off a recommended list, and it’s been fine.
To sign up I had to answer 3 super simple subjective questions. Took 2 mins. Had to wait to get approved, but in the meantime I could still browse so it really didn’t matter.
To me, the hard part was learning lemmy/kbin/beehaw etc existed.
All of this is fairly reasonable for the kind of project it is. Sounds like you and those users don’t understand what signing up at any site really means and you’ve been so separated by the front end, you be have no ability to show grace when basically using a website for free hosted and manages by free people what takes money donated by others?
Why is this anyone else’s fault but you? You’ve gotten spoiled. Maybe everything isn’t for you if you cannot even do the bare minimum to participate?
How do you think I came to be here if I wouldn’t be able to do the bare minimum?
I’m very well aware of how it all works on the technical side, but the basic problem is that social networks only work when there’s a large network of people connected to each other. If you’re satisfied with the maybe hundred people that are active in this community that’s great, but the whole discussion in this thread is about why Reddit can’t be replaced by Lemmy.
I’m not trying to be judgemental about the process itself, I’m just saying that all of the points I made are dealbreakers for the question of Reddit replacement.
It’s obviously not Reddit numbers, but been a lot of posts about how much lemmy/etc have grown in the last week, largely due to the Reddit fallout.
Clearly it’s not going to replace Reddit overnight, but it’s made large strides very suddenly, and can def close that gap over time. Especially for people like me who enjoyed Reddit, but were just browsers, not really power users
People are signing up, but the number of posts and comments is still very low. In my subscription feed, there’s a new post every few hours and maybe 10 comments per hour. I’ve been on local message boards with more activity than that back in the 90s.
not enough people here? lemmy instances total are close to a million and that isn’t even including kbin users
also, what you said about the sign up process is entirely because of the influx of new users right now - of course its not good UX but with the community beehaw wants to foster, they need that application and they’re 4 people accepting all of them!
be reasonable and accept that this site is young! it has not had the decade of development that reddit has behind it! things are weird and still broken and that is okay, the community adapts to its quirks
Not all of them use the application process, many are just captcha plus email. Then Beehaw is failing to send confirmation emails.
The sign up process has to incorporate security to protect the Lemmy federation from spambots and other exploitation. Yeah it’s a hassle, but it’s not there to annoy people, rather to provide the best possible user experience. But still an application is something that can dissuade a potential user. That’s why many don’t use one.
Beehaw is one of the most heavily laden instances probably second only to the originating lemmy.ml instance. An overloaded instance can result in hangs and sluggish performance. Also true for one with high latency such as one located overseas.
It’s true the chore of finding a good instance can dissuade some people. If you don’t know any better and sign up on a bad instance it can unfairly soil your opinion of the whole Lemmy federation.
Once you find an instance you like (good ping, good performance, good admin) all the content across all the instances is there, barring any defederation. Which communities are local to the instance is not normally a selection criteria.
It’s not nearly as user friendly as reddit yet. People won’t spend the time to figure it out.