In other places on around the web, (chiefly /r/RedditAlternatives) whenever Lemmy is brought up, invariably I see the exact same complaints from brand new accounts.
Lemmy is too complicated, it wont gain traction, can’t figure out how to use it, can’t log in, etc.
Now, I’m definitely more tech savvy than the average redditor, but I just don’t see the complaints. You can go to any Lemmy site, instantly start doomscrolling with a familiar UI, and sign up on all the instances I’ve tried has been frankly more simple than making a new reddit account. The only real complaint I have is the generally smaller volume of users and posts.
My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.
Ideally, the first link someone sees when googling Lemmy would be a global feed on a fairly generic instance, with a basic tagline akin to ‘front page of the internet.’ End users don’t need to care about the technical details, at least not until they’re interested in the platform.
So is this “Lemmy is too confusing” sentiment even real? And if not, what motive would there be to astroturf this?
If it is a real issue affecting would-be users, how can we address it?
If the fediverse has any chance at properly succeeding it must create a “front page” for each alternative. Lemmy for reddit for example. There is no reason why all of lemmy can’t have a front page like old.lemmy.world with each community/platform on lemmy being connected and allowing for ease of access unlike what it is currently where you need a different account for every single Lemmy site
Your comment seems to misunderstand federation and the function of activitypub. Lemmy does have an All front page that is the front page of All Lemmy servers that your instance knows about and hasn’t defederated with.
You don’t need an account for each instance, you just post on your local instances copy of the community/post and your post shows up on all other Lemmy servers that you instance knows about.
You may have inadvertently made your own point, that it isn’t intuitive for newcomers but a single front page/account totally defeats the purpose of decentralized social media.
You have described BlueSky which is distributed but not decentralized and will enshittify the same as Reddit and twitter and the only benefit to ATProto is some other public benefit corp could potentially host a copy of the network in its place until that business decides to enshittify of course
This is exactly why we need a software solution as an app for Lemmy rather than web + plugins
I know none that exist right now
What are you talking about? You are using a lemmy.world account to comment in a lemmy.ml community right now.