this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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It's a lot of abuse to take, I'm kind of surprised more redditors haven't jumped ship. It's so much cozier here on lemmy, I just think maybe redditors have no idea what the water is like over here and so they haven't even dipped a toe into any alternatives.
Tbh, Lemmy is much more difficult to get into. I wouldn't be here if I wasn't somewhat dogmatically against reddit's shenanigans. My buddy who uses the official app doesn't really care about any of this stuff. Even I feel a bit alienated by Lemmy because it feels so dominated by tech workers. Your average meme-enjoyer is going to see multiple instances, buggy apps, none of their favorite communities and they're going to bounce off it. I like Lemmy but we need to be realistic about how palatable it is.
It's gotten a lot better in a few weeks.
There's a lot that can be improved, and people are working on it. It just needs more time as things settle
You're not wrong, but it is definitely getting better. I think the organization of Lemmy takes some getting used to, and as well, I think finding new places to look on Lemmy isn't quite as easy as Reddit is, which might be an area that the software could improve a bit.
Is Reddit easy to explore for new places? Maybe it got better in the new UI, but search was historically bad and discovering relevant subs was pretty difficult. I sort of think people dipping their toes in fediverse waters forget how rough around the edges Reddit was/is. I agree that lemmy and its ilk have a lot of room to improve on usability, but the bar doesn't seem exceptionally high.
It's an early adopter problem, and it could be much worse (looking at you, Tildes, where I swear I was one of less than 10 users who were not either well compensated professionals (tech or otherwise), or in school at the time to become one, at least before the latest Reddit exodus. At least most of the Lemmy instances, while tech heavy, don't have the same smugness that a lot of nearly-exclusively highly compensated white collar worker spaces do. (Not that Tildes is unique in that space in the least, Hacker News is utterly insufferable, and the personalfinance and povertyfinance subreddit split arose for the same reasons)
Luckily I think Lemmy has more potential to get more early adopters who don't work with tech professionally, especially on an instance like Beehaw. I haven't felt like some kind of lower class interloper (as someone who is in lower level retail management for work) here, unlike many other super techy spaces.
I'm a tech worker and sometimes shitposter.
I had a bunch of alt accounts, for different purposes that I didn't want cross referenced (no need for my career-oriented alts to be associated with my political views or details about my family life or personal relationships), and then I just kept enforcing that principle of least privilege to segmenting my different hobbies and interests into different accounts. Third party apps made it easy, so I just kept doing that.
So now that I no longer use a third party app, it was a natural time to delete a bunch of old accounts. Lemmy provides enough of an alternate for any technology-related discussion, and I have confidence that the discussions about food, sports, entertainment, parenting, etc., will eventually reach near parity with reddit. For now, though, I keep my career-focused account to browse lawyer-related subreddits (including the private /r/lawyers), and my city-focused account to participate in discussions about my city, because I don't think lemmy will be there for quite some time. Of course, now that I no longer look at reddit from a mobile device, I basically only use RES+old.reddit whenever I happen to be on my personal laptop (which is relatively rare these days).
I'll be honest, that matches my own patterns myself. I use Reddit for some of the niche communities that don't exist here yet, but eventually they will exist here I hope. I still have two separate accounts here for maintaining the least privilege principle you are doing too.
I'm still pissed the /r/sysadmins didn't move over or even blackout. They have no excuse! Then again, I need to see if /r/linuxadmins moved over.
This entire comment almost perfectly describes my experience. I've dropped a lot of my other accounts and only really use one or two for school/local stuff
Any good legal related communities popping up yet? I liked reading legalAdvice and was waiting for something like that here
Honestly, it'll probably have to go the same route that reddit's communities organically formed. As AskReddit got bigger, the IAMA and AskScience and AskHistorians and AskWomen and AskMen communities started popping up. As Fitness got bigger, the very specific niche fitness subreddits and sport-specific subreddits popped up, too.
For now, I'm guessing political and advice communities will start attracting some specific topics where a few people who have legal expertise will participate, up until there's enough critical mass to form a more narrowly focused community that specifically relates to legal topics and has a higher threshold for necessary background/knowledge/experience/education to be able to competently participate.