I actually think this post has a lot of solid points, many of which I have argued myself in the past. One thing was funny though. He says:

Today's Reddit is a phone product. The “just use the web UI” crowd is not representative of mainstream behavior.

and then several users in the comments were turned off by the Web UI of Lemmy.

If a user taps “subscribe,” store it locally. When they finally create an account, they should be able to “claim” those subscriptions. This is a small UX move that has an outsized effect on conversion.

Any evidence for this? Twitter tried something like this, but then moved to putting everything behind a log in wall so I'm led to believe that the latter has better guest-to-registration statistics.

How delightfully European Union of them to debate debate debate in the face of a looming crisis.

Yes Lemmy has a lot of improving to do, but I'm not seeing many other alternatives!

actually I do think aggregated sublemmies would be a good thing for engagement and content discovery - it seems silly that there are 4 different communities all about the same thing (eg buyfromeu)

reddit also has the google search privilege which makes hard to beat, it actively hides lemmy site.

I just left reddit and registered lemmy. Did it all on a train ride. It felt pretty easy. Had to search two things: which app do I use for lemmy? And: how do I register for lemmy? Other than that: effortless.

I had some doubts about Lemmy, thinking nobody uses it. Postponed registering for years, but I abandoned Reddit anyway.

Turned out, it’s quality over quantity, and having less people is not the issue, but rather the opposite. I’m genuinely impressed how good it is. Also, using iOS, Mlem is a wonderful piece of software. The interface is much better than Reddit! It feels like a very solid upgrade.

The only thing missing on Lemmy is specialised communities. For everything about news and memes it's actually much more dynamic and interesting to interact here. Other than that, Reddit is basically only outrage and fake karma stories now.

It seems part of the problem is that a lot of people from here want to explain Reddit users why federated platforms are the only viable options, and the Reddit users misunderstand this explanation of how the platforms work and why they have to work that way as an explanation of how to use them.

Using Lemmy or Piefed is not hard. Understanding why centralized alternatives is not an alternative at all, now that requires you to be interested and understand some things. But we don't really need people to understand that. We just need them to sign up for some instance or another. Preferably not a tankie one.

The best strategy I found is to tell Reddit users to use both platforms. Lemmy doesn't need to be the perfect alternative right away. They just need to test and see that the fediverse is not that hard to understand.

I'm dumb as a fucking brick and yet here I am.

There literally is no excuse if I can figure it out. The only excuse I see is that people just don't want to leave the comfort of reddit and go here and actually put in the effort to build this place. Which btw isn't super hard either. You can make or comment on posts of you're a tech retard like I am. That is a way to keep the pulse of this place alive.

I think people would do themselves a favor if they just admitted that they don't want to change because of the comfort of the big tech platforms and how they feed you endless entertainment without you having to make any effort.

If I feel Lemmy is dull, it is my own fault for not adding to it. If I don't have anything to add, I'll have to deal with Lemmy being boring for a day or two and in the meantime I do something else.

I think the scariest part about mainstream social media and part of why I cut the chord, was because it turns you into a mindless zombie. I still deal woth someone of the effects of it. The fear of boredom. It's such a destructive thing I allowed to do to my brain and it'll take me a minute to learn to be bored again. Already much better now than I used to be, but fuck. The level of lazy social media lures you into is scary.

Been a rocky road for me, more than a year ago I created a lemm.ee account, even used that for a few weeks later, but got a bit bored because I felt there was not enough diversity in here. And then lemm.ee was taken down. Kind of a double whammy.

Yesterday someone in reddit brought up a discussion how signing up and using lemmy should be simplified, they had a link, clicked it and simply registered a new account there without even checking what instance it was (I simply can't be bothered to do the research again), so I ended up with a thelemmy.club account. Then someone promoted piefed.social, said its easy, so I created an account for that too, so here I am.

Then I found out piefed.social has a philosophy to not show downvotes or upvote downvote percentages, I kind of like checking downvotes too, I mean its not youtube (yes, shots fired) so I tried to get out of that quite quickly. Luckily phtn.app supports piefed.social and looks nice, while on phone I already had Summit installed from lemm.ee times and that supports piefed.social too, even though its not a lemmy system or what you call it.

Right now I'm working through these 300 subscriptions that piefed suggested me, unsubscribing from some i don't like, then i'll probably read feed for All for a while to discover new communities. Let's see how long I last on this fediverse thing this time.

I also have mastodon on my phone, but I was never into instagram / twitter etc, so im not very into that too and its kind of a ghost town. Same goes for pixelfed. I also have a Loops account (even though I've never used tiktok either), thats starting to look better, but still needs more people, I think.

Quick question, is there a non-reddit link to read this, preferably on Lemmy

It felt effortless to me. It might need a bit more polished user interface on web, but other than that it feels like a good, user friendly app. What it needs rather is more visibility.

It can't feel effortless and it never will. Why? Because Reddit is like having every person in your telehone book, easy to find and communicate with. And Lemmy and fediverse in general are like phone numbers without a phone book. You and someone else might both have telephones, but unless you meet in person or another way to exchange contact details, you can't communicate with each other.

So, people need to put a bit more effort in it to understand it, or we need a fediverse telephone book.

I only joined a few days ago. And I was positively surprised by the guest mode that boost provides. It already has a bunch of default subscriptions. Although a first run wizard would have been even better.

I was a bit disappointed when I created an account and the feed was suddenly completely empty.

I also would like to see a smarter home feed. Cluster algorithms and engagement tracking could help some. But I'm currently missing a way more basic feature. Please don't show me the same posts over and over again, every time I open the app!

it needs to feel effortless

What an entitled take. No community worth its space is "effortless". Building an actual, worthwhile community takes care and time, and that need never ends.

But what people really want in these hollow comparisons to Reddit is an infinite content machine - a place to go for an endless stream of mindless content that requires no effort on their part. It's purely selfish, and if those people are turned away by the "effort" required just to sign up, then good. Users like that are, at best, a burden, and more likely to sway these spaces into directions they're better off not headed.

The thing is yes we need people, but we need people to understand the concept and build new instances, whether this is for personal use or to accept new users.
Also I don't get why this guy is trying to sell lemmy to users reddit. Lemmy is supposed to be a different, better than reddit in other ways, why change it? Don't forget that the creators of lemmy, need $$$$ per month, and features are not 100% doable.

People also say we don't have user base! We have, but they are here only for politics.

Also, joining to lemmy, it can be done ether by joining an instance or making an instance. And don't forget the main point, for lemmy to survive and work correct, lots instances need to exist.

piefed