If a lot of mods stopped using reddit, it would get absolutely inundated with actual regulatory attacks because it would get flooded with child porn, explicit harrassment, and nazis.
Any of the top 10 communities having enough mods resign would cause absolute havoc for reddit, yet they consistently screw over mods.
To be clear I'm not downplaying how terrible it must have smelled in more heavily effected areas; I didn't mean to come across as doing so.
I'm seeing the same, not sure if it's all images in comments or just that one
I mean, to me (in the DC area, so not nearly as bad as it was further north) it just smelled like a campfire outside to me. It wasn't a particularly offensive smell.
But I could FEEL that the air quality was bad every time I took a breath, and I don't have any kinds of respiratory issues.
Same. I'll probably still use reddit on desktop to use some of the communities I like that aren't in lemmy yet, but I'm gonna use lemmy only on mobile.
Yeah, I don't see any reason for spez to put it in the OP unless it's on the chopping block too.
I kind of agree.... And also kind of disagree.
I think people will be attracted to places like blue sky because they are more similar to what they are used to and more user friendly. When people were looking to leave Twitter, I remember Mastodon being talked about. When I first looked into it, it was super confusing. I'm literally a software developer, and I was having trouble figuring out what was even going on here.
I understand that different platforms will have different features, and don't expect lemmy to be exactly like reddit or mastodon to be exactly like Twitter. But to get casual users to come to either, they need to be easy to join, easy to use, and easy to understand. I think that starting off by explaining to users what the fediverse is is too confusing.
Frankly, I think the biggest thing right now, by far, is that there needs to be a centralized, or pseudo-centralized, login system. That is the biggest hurdle for all new users, and explaining how to make an account basically requires explaining how the fediverse works-which for most people is just too much information at once. They'll see that, think "this is too confusing," and leave.
Ease of use and adding more features will come with time, more users, and an influx of money from those users to support development. But we need to attract users first, and to do so we need to make the process of joining really clear, concise, and easy. And we need to remove the risk that if your instance gets deleted, so does your account.
This may unironically be the first time I've ever suggested this: this may actually be a use case for the block chain.
If the user data from all instances was being saved to a distributed and verified ledger, it would fix the problem of one node going down losing all of those users, and would be a decentralized yet centralized way to go about it.
... I feel dirty, I swear I'm not a cryptobro
Your point #3 is by far my biggest concern with lemmy, and the reason that I made an account on lemmy.ml. It seemed big and populated enough to feel confident it wo t go away. The devs need to find a way to make that happen. Partly because of what you said but also because it's super confusing to click on a link and suddenly appear to be logged out because it took you to a different instance.
I fully agree that for more casual users these 3 things are BIG turnoffs.
Fully agree about subscribing to communities outside your instance. That's something that needs to be cleaned up if were aiming for widespread adoption. It's too confusing for casual users as it is.
I'm using Jeroba on android and I think it's pretty solid so far, considering how new it is. It has more than I expected it to, it just needs time to get developed more. There's a few features I want to go make github issues to request, but they're nothing critical.
And I agree with your last paragraph completely. I think most people using third party apps were not lurkers. Most of them were probably using a 3pa because they had been for years, from the time when the reddit app was either nonexistent or even worse than tosay, or had found the reddit app too annoying to comment and post with. They're people who use reddit so much on their phone that the official app is too annoying and ugly to tolerate.
And seeing how many mods are ip in arms about the mod tools they use, it seems like reddit is really shooting itself in the foot.
It's incredibly frustrating, as a developer, how much our jobs keep ballooning to encompass more and more stuff.
I'm expected to be able to work in the backend, frontend (in two DIFFERENT frameworks no less), database, and also to fully understand the infrastructure the code runs on, how to manage and control that infrastructure, how to manage access to that infrastructure, how to interface with that infrastructure in the software I'm working on, and how to do testing from unit to integration testing, and to do ALL of it as well and as fast as it was done 5 years ago- when there was a guy on the team who was the "frontend" guy, a guy who managed everything about AWS, and a dedicated tester.
It's all a scam from management; they cut down on costs by cutting a bunch of jobs and offloading those responsibilities onto the rest of us. But if things break, it all comes down onto my head. And also they don't pay me more for the added responsibility.
Oh, and the real kicker is that all of it is intermittent. Sometimes I spend 3 months doing all backend work as we set up a new microservice. Sometimes, I spend 3 months doing all frontend work as we create a new UI. That intermittency makes it EXTREMELY difficult for me to really master any of it, because I'm jumping around often enough that I don't get enough time to really build a deeper skillset. Then, I'm quietly shamed by management for not spending my spare time developing my skillset to make them more money.
I'm expected to, somehow, keep up to date on 4 different languages, all of the new shortcuts and capabilities of those languages, and also all of the infrastructure that we are using to deploy and manage our code. When I joined the workforce 7 years ago, we were right in the middle of this transition- so, not only did I never get the time to really master any of the languages I work with, I have perpetually felt a kinda strong imposter syndrome- and talking to other developers online and in person, I'm not alone.
The result is that myself and everyone around me are more stressed, producing less optimized and less reliable code that could be WAY better if we had more time (but we don't get more time, because timelines keep getting tighter while management keeps doing what I described above) and are not feeling like we are really learning how to do better.
I know I'm not the only one who feels this way either because I see the same sentiment literally everywhere. It's incredibly frustrating.