In other places on around the web, (chiefly /r/RedditAlternatives) whenever Lemmy is brought up, invariably I see the exact same complaints from brand new accounts.
Lemmy is too complicated, it wont gain traction, can’t figure out how to use it, can’t log in, etc.
Now, I’m definitely more tech savvy than the average redditor, but I just don’t see the complaints. You can go to any Lemmy site, instantly start doomscrolling with a familiar UI, and sign up on all the instances I’ve tried has been frankly more simple than making a new reddit account. The only real complaint I have is the generally smaller volume of users and posts.
My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.
Ideally, the first link someone sees when googling Lemmy would be a global feed on a fairly generic instance, with a basic tagline akin to ‘front page of the internet.’ End users don’t need to care about the technical details, at least not until they’re interested in the platform.
So is this “Lemmy is too confusing” sentiment even real? And if not, what motive would there be to astroturf this?
If it is a real issue affecting would-be users, how can we address it?
Tip for you since it sounds you are genuinely trying it out but are running into issues: you can post and comment on outside Lemmy communities without creating a different account for the most part. Just navigate to lemmy.world/c/[community name]@[other site domain]. Example: https://lemmy.world/c/science_memes@mander.xyz means you can interact with the community on mander.xyz while staying on your lemmy.world account.
A Lemmy server agnostic link can be made in the form of ![community name]@[other site domain]. Example: !science_memes@mander.xyz, or !fediverse@lemmy.world to help people from anywhere on lemmy to link to c/fediverse.
There’s still a lot of gaps like official methods to redirect post and comment links to your instance (I heard it was coming soon) It is indeed behind Reddit in a lot of technical and social aspects, but I think it’s not completely a bad thing.