While I do agree lemmy adds a layer or two of complexity compared to the simple "plug-and-play" reddit model, the article comes across as blaming all of the author's lemmy-related issues on the software rather than admitting he just doesn't understand how to use it.

Unlike Reddit’s approach of categorization using subreddits, Lemmy instances are mostly entire servers that act as catch-all versions of subreddits.

This is one example. Subreddits =/= instances. A more apt comparison would be communities, and then he can point out how communities are hosted by different instances. I mean, how did he miss that?

Another one is when he said there was no visual representation of "All" and "Local". Just one look at an instance's page shows you those options quite clearly.

Try as I might, I missed the curation and consolidation of Reddit, where content is batched up into similar topics.

Wait... What? That's kind of exactly what's happening in lemmy communities.

I may be biased, but despite lemmy's many shortcomings/growing pains I feel the author should have acquired at least a basic understanding of how all this works before writing an article that points out "problems" when there is none.

Edit: I'm on mobile so it's hard to quote every single line. But there were more than a few mistakes there.

Lemmy tell you, the article was from 16 June which was before many of the recent updates and the flurry of app development.

Gaming journalists can't game, tech journalists can't tech. Nothing but a skill issue like usual.

Oh no, a new discussion board is neither as robust nor as polished as one with over a decade of use and revision.

Most of the complaints are just whining that Lemmy isn't a perfect drop-in replacement for his love of endless, constant time wasting on Reddit. OTOH, the issue of multiple, nominally identical communities on Lemmy is a true weakness of the platform (imho, of course).

it’ll suffer the same fate as Mastodon

You mean, be successful. Good that this fucker who "tried and promptly quit" Mastodon finds himself called to judge it.

I'm suspicious of any tech writer that can't get a feel for a platform in seven days, big ole scary/confusing federated servers or not, lemmy just isn't nearly as confusing as some people want to make it out to be. Particularly if you've ever actually used reddit before. Frankly, after reading this article I'm not convinced he understands either platform in any meaningful way.

The comment section of the article pretty much disagree completely. You can add your opinion there too. 👌

initially getting into Lemmy was hard because there were like 2 mobile apps in existence that were horrendously broken.

since the spike in users there's been so many more apps and the existing ones have had many community contributions and work great!

Who cares? If I wanted more redid I would stay there.

Sadly, denigrating other people work is a good way to look smart without having to create anything ourselves. That's why I always measure a new software through the question "what new thing it allows me to do or what does it make simpler?" rather than "what are other people thinking about it?". In the case of the fediverse, the value proposition is quite clear : it allows to have a social life online without being at the mercy of BigTech, through interoperable softwares. And in the case of Lemmy, it allows to do that to replace Reddit. So yeah, some people don't like it, whatever. :)

Since the twitter migration, mainstream media has had a pretty bad bias against the fediverse. I wouldn't listen to anything from the media about any fediverse platform because they're either driving at a preconceived critique (usually it's too hard or unstable), or, don't understand it ... and I'm the sort of person that is very willing to critique the shit of the fediverse.

As to why there's such a bias ... probably a confluence of a few factors:

• Mainstream media doesn't support actual journalism. So any article is probably written by someone on a tight deadline without enough time to actually understand the fediverse or even the will to do so.
• Mainstream media has had a cozy relationship with big-social, especially twitter (and facebook?), and generally feel like mass engagement based platforms are necessary for their business ... and so the fediverse is, on some level, basically a threat to their livelihood.
• Going further ... any form of media that is essentially non-profit and self-organised or hosted is probably a threat to mass media's perceived livelihood, so even on an ideological basis, the core of the fediverse is something between dangerous, value-less or dumb. Therefore, any friction or tradeoff is almost immediately fatal to them.

Feel rage. It's FUD.

The many instances and multiples of the same communities across all instances would absolutely be confusing to your average joe. But, once you start using Lemmy you realize understanding all that doesn't matter and it just works. As for the stability thing.... A fediverse of new communities based on open source software has growing pains? Gasp.... The article reads like that person is truly unaware of how software works in the beginning.

Author even tried mastodon and promptly quit.

Why doesn't they elaborate on that either or do they just want to underline their point that the Fediverse is too broken and user unfriendly without giving any reasons?

Then they say that instances are confusing, which is an essential part of the Fediverse. Do they find it confusing that you have to pick a website (one of which being reddit.com) to visit aswell?

Bad article all around.

Article summary:

Reddit, a popular online platform for discussions and news, has recently faced issues with increased API pricing and moderator-led shutdowns. As a result, users have been exploring alternatives such as Lemmy. Lemmy is a federated social platform that allows independent servers to communicate with each other. However, the user experience on Lemmy can be confusing, as it lacks the categorization and consolidation of Reddit. Additionally, the decentralized nature of Lemmy makes it difficult to discover niche interests and results in frequent server issues. The federated platforms also struggle with real-time message synchronization. Overall, Lemmy is still in its early stages and lacks the polish, diversity of content, and ease of access needed to compete with Reddit. Unless significant efforts are made to simplify the platform for average users, it is unlikely to gain widespread traction.

Beep boop, I'm a human and I summarized the article using a custom implementation of the gpt-3.5-turbo LLM model

Lemmy seems fine to me SDF.org really knows where its towel is at

My experience has been great, even with the lemmy.world outages. A couple of my favourite niche communities are now coming to life and I now post more here now than I do on reddit. Of course there are still glitches and bugs and it is more confusing than reddit for new users, but all that will resolve itself over time. Reddit has had well over a decade to fine tune itself whereas the fediverse is only a couple of years old and has only really in the last couple of months seen a massive influx of new users that have tested its infrastructure to its limits and sometimes beyond

There are teachers that are trying to find what you know, and those that are trying to prove that you don't know.

Second kind is not my favourite.

While technically true, article is missing the point and is not showing good sides.

But it might be good, if someone comes here expecting complicated technical experience, it might keep them around. At least they are acknowledging lemmy exist.

I've joined 3 weeks ago and aside from a couple of images not being visible once in a while and my instance being down one day, I haven't had issues at all. But I could easily create an account on another instance as backup and browse there.

Signup was a bit confusing at first because the apps are not 100% there yet, but in general the apps do everything you want them to 99% of the time. Only "powerusers" will be unsatisfied.

There is easily enough content to browse all day already and I'd say a lot of content isn't even techie related or politically charged.

I'm just missing a few art subreddits, but that's it, compared to Reddit it was a pretty easy transistion. I don't miss it at all.

New to Lemmy and not a huge reddit user in the past and to me both are exactly the same amount of confusing (i.e. a bit).

A lot of the time when I write a post and hit submit it just won’t submit, which is annoying. But it doesn’t bother me enough to go back to Reddit.

UI is still a bit weird. I enjoy Lemmy but linking or getting back to the context of a comment is still not possible (on Firefox/Chrome)

Servers having different admins is definitely a plus over the Reddit model. If I don't like the admins, I can go to another instance, and if the mods of a board/sublemmit get power hungry people can easily move the bulk of users to a different instance with the same name and other mods.

Reddit was really starting to suffer under admin and mod abuse, even before the API changes.

How is lemmy confusing? Unless they mean how it works, it looks to me like a standard interface. Sounds like they don't really know what it is.