First of all I am super happy that such alternative exists but it’s far from perfect due to many reasons and this is why I think it’s not ready yet to absorb the influx of reddit users because many of them will just bounce off when they realize it.
My biggest gripes so far:
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Users are unable to block whole instances hence you either need to register with instance that already blocks unwanted instances (which is not perfect because it might block also those that you don’t want to be blocked) or you need to block manually every single community there or you will be exposed to lemmygrad or other tankie instances. That’s so basic feature I can’t find any logical reasons that was not a thing since day 1.
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Lemmy is one of the least privacy friendly (unless you just use throwaways and disposable mail like you should) service I have ever stumbled upon and while it’s partially due to how federation works it’s just a fact that even reddit did that better because it was way easier to nuke your account and all traces (including nicknames in deleted comments, which is not a case on lemmy).
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There is no possibility to migrate or backup your subscribed/favorited stuff or even move it to another instance (which somehow is possible on Mastodon), so you basically have to trust that your instance won’t disappear overnight. Obviously any site can disappear, centralized or not but there are bigger chances that some random Joe will decide to close instance without saying anything than reddit closing down overnight without letting you copy your stuff. That’s even more annyoing if you consider that instance admin can restrict you from viewing instances they don’t like, hence you would need to create account on another instance and resubscribe to anything manually which is far from perfect.
What are your views on that for the time being?
I’m staying here but I think we need to to make an ongoing campaign to use our reddit accounts to spread the word about Lemmy. The vast majority of redditors are still unaware of our existence. So I’m basically leaving my 10 year account up and only commenting to politely let people know about lemmy and how to join. It’s sad because so many people have only been on reddit for a few years or (gasp) less than a year and are naively accepting reddits bullshit because they don’t understand how much better things could be, and were once upon a time.
Knock knock!
Would you like to hear about our lord and savior, The Great Lemming? (He jumped off cliff for our sins.)
It’s better to spread the word of “Federation” aka the “Fediverse” Lemmy/Kbin and whatever else comes into this format.
The real beauty is how well these systems can interop with Calckey/Misskey/Pleroma/Mastodon and PixelFed amongst Tumblr and Mozilla showing up.
Lemmy is just one thing - but the awesomeness is the variety and interopability.
People on all those other cool platforms can spread the word about them. I’m just on Lemmy for now so that’s what I know about.