Comment on Lemmy is a failed Reddit alternative
Gorilladrums21@lemmy.world 4 months agoI mean good for you, I’m glad you’re happy here. But here’s a question for you, do you honestly think that this platform has the potential to be more than what it is currently? Platforms come and go, true, but it’s very rare for a platform to actually appeal to the general masses. MySpace at its peak had 90 million active users, Google+ had 200 million users, Yahoo still has around 700 million people use its services. While these sites ended up being failures, they still reached mainstream status. I don’t think Lemmy will die, but I don’t see it becoming a mainstream alternative to Reddit. I see it as an upgraded version of Voat. It’s a platform that will remain niche unless something drastic changes.
vk6flab@lemmy.radio 4 months ago
I think that the missing link for the fediverse is the user interface that most users see.
This is oxymoronic given that the original Reddit looks eerily similar to Lemmy today, but it’s not just looks I’m talking about.
Moderation and usability tools, bots, blocks, filtering and spam control need to go through several iterations before we can actually grow this community.
Search is another issue, as is post deletion. Right now a post vanishes, but all the stuff hanging off it is still there. This makes for a complex user experience.
Finally, Lemmy appears to be run by developers who appear to be interested in their own issues and regularly appear to dismiss issues raised by users. This is not sustainable.
I consider myself a user of the fediverse before I’m a Lemmy or Mastodon user. We have a way to go before this settles down.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
I would love to fix all the issues that users report, but for that we would need about ten times as many developers. The way it is we simply don’t have enough time to work on everything, and need to prioritize things.