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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Technology
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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.
Bro this is a skill issue
Not everyone is a writer.
You misinterpreted what the application form is for. I have accounts on 3 instances (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org and lemmy.one) and for each of them my application message was "came from reddit." It's just a way for them to reduce abusive signups; even with that, 2/3 of those instances don't even require email verification. It literally takes 10 seconds to sign up and somehow you spent 86400 of them.
That’s not what the form's instructions say. I can’t read the mind of the admins to know how little I can get away with.
Perhaps don't advertise that you're willing to do no more than the absolute bare minimum to try to hoodwink the admins.
I didn't, that's why it took an hour to write the application form. Which is totally unacceptable for the general population.
To reiterate what I said in the last paragraph;
That’s not true from a technical point of view. A remote subscriber is way more expensive than a local one, so on the technical side it’s better when everyone signs up on the server where most of their communities are.
That may be true, but most of the communities I'm subscribed to are remote. I've not experienced any issue at all. In fact I'm getting your reply pretty much instantaneously and I'm on lemm.ee in the USA and you're on feddit.de in Germany.
I'd just like to say sorry for the experience you've had with Beehaw, we're trying our best at the moment to get through everyone but it's been a really hard time.. We think we might be able to reach 0 people left in our queue by the end of tomorrow (optimistically, there's about 2k left)
Maybe change the wording on the site to say one week to assume rejection, not 24h.
Or you can just figure that out from the fact they are swamped? This constant need for instant satisfaction is unreasonable to expect from others.
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.
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
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.
It sounds like you want a firehose. Most of us do not, from the comments I've seen here.
But, hey ... great thing about Lemmy is you get to find a server that suits your needs. If sheer volume is what you're after, other instances are geared toward that.
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 was not difficult for me to sign up. I had to give some moments of thought to each step except the form application which I gave a couple moments of thought. I was kind of glad it wasn't instant-simple because I'd prefer thinking people be here.
That prolly sounds smackish but it's just my directness. I really didn't have any problems.
The thing with federation is, that this isn't really the result. The application for the server I got in was way easier, it was "convince me that you're not a robot".
The text field itself isn't even that big of a problem IMO, it's the delay of several days. Most people will have forgotten about it by then.
Why isnt it easy. It took me less time to sign up for lemmy than it did for reddit back in the day and I've had no issues at all. Some confusing back end stuff and relearning all the formatting for urls and etc but it's no more complicated than reddit was to first get into.
It's not nearly as user friendly as reddit yet. People won't spend the time to figure it out.