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Comment by icapybara | Hacker News Reader

I think we all want a viable Reddit alternative (and Twitter alternative), but the “fediverse” isn’t it. Why?

1. New user experience is very confusing. You have to learn a bunch of dorky sounding terminology right away (instance, fediverse/federated, etc), and there are a whole bunch of instances to choose from, but none of them may be particularly appealing or relevant to you specifically.

2. At least on Lemmy, I’m actively discouraged from signing up. And even if I ignore that, I have to fill out an application for an account that includes a personal statement on why I want to join Lemmy. Great, Lemmy can do whatever it wants, but it’s not a Reddit killer with a process like this.

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Regarding 1.: In my memory, Reddit was just as confusing to newcomers, with all their terminology. What are these words people keep mentioning here? sub, GP, OP, flair, gold, sidebar, ...

Twitter also took me ages to understand what RT and HT and via was supposed to mean and what the difference was between retweets and replies and stars (that are now likes?)...

> New user experience is very confusing. You have to learn a bunch of dorky sounding terminology right away (instance, fediverse/federated, etc), and there are a whole bunch of instances to choose from, but none of them may be particularly appealing or relevant to you specifically.

For technical discussions, this is a feature not a bug. Having a small technical hurdle to get over before contributing is a filter when it comes to having technical conversations that aren’t immediately shit up by low effort content.

The somethingawful forums are STILL around despite not being relevant in popular internet culture for almost 2 decades. Paying a one time $10 fee to post kept out people who weren’t really interested in contributing to the conversation.

Reddit is a massive social website. The vast majority of the value of Reddit comes from the fact that it's humongous. A niche community that tries to filter out most people isn't a Reddit replacement.

I think some people are talking past each other when referring to a "reddit replacement" by focusing on different aspects and even different eras of reddit.

Speaking for myself, I would love to see some of the features reddit popularized be brought to a replacement. However, I'm not at all interested in a one-to-one replacement of reddit in its current form, especially if we take "current form" to mean what a typical user would experience joining the site today.

Yeah I think Reddit is different things to different people. I personally spent a lot of time in hobby subreddits and in my city's local subreddit which at times was really an amazing way to find out about all sorts of cool events.

Personally, this post is peak Reddit to me https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1d9xh5/epic_of_the_...

People aren't asking for a replacement for all of reddit; they want to replace their favorite subreddits. Being niche is an advantage.

Agree. It’s a nice barrier to entry . Like the fee to shop at bulk stores, expensive grocers, or professional certifications.

I’m getting distracted less without Reddit and two notifications per day at a chosen time from email/slack/etc.

How is a fee for a certification "a nice barrier to entry"? I get an argument about funding the body in question, but the barrier thing?

Point #1 is accurate, but #2 is actually just you getting confused by #1—lemmy.ml is discouraging new signups by encouraging you to use one of the many other instances.

I agree that the whole federation thing is way more confusing than insiders understand.

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