I wanted to get a pulse check on how new members are finding the general experience/website. Is it more confusing than Reddit or are you finding the instance system a better way of doing things as it can give you more freedom of where you choose to create an account?
I’m a new user myself but have found the experience to remind me of Reddit back in the day, lol. It’s definitely giving me old-school yet modern vibes and it’s great to see something that isn’t Reddit growing in popularity!
It’s welcoming but confusing. I think there’s two reasons for the latter:
1- Many of us forget how basic Reddit was when we first started using it, and the features we all know and love got added over time and repeatedly refined based on use.
2- Most of us here are because we have been users of incredibly well designed apps crafted by developers with a passion for great UI. If I try using the (new) Reddit site or their default app, I find myself equally confused.
There are still so many changes happening in Lemmy functionality, and as we’ve seen with Mastodon, we will hopefully soon be overwhelmed with great apps.
In the meantime there’s the great community already here and growing. I saw a comment that you can estimate that Reddit has 90% lurkers, 9% commenters, 0.9% posters, and 0.1% “community builders” I think it’s those latter groups who are leading the exodus, which is great news for us and terrible news for whoever ends up owning Reddit.
I’m using Jeroba on android and I think it’s pretty solid so far, considering how new it is. It has more than I expected it to, it just needs time to get developed more. There’s a few features I want to go make github issues to request, but they’re nothing critical.
And I agree with your last paragraph completely. I think most people using third party apps were not lurkers. Most of them were probably using a 3pa because they had been for years, from the time when the reddit app was either nonexistent or even worse than tosay, or had found the reddit app too annoying to comment and post with. They’re people who use reddit so much on their phone that the official app is too annoying and ugly to tolerate.
And seeing how many mods are ip in arms about the mod tools they use, it seems like reddit is really shooting itself in the foot.
I wonder if the Reddit board really appreciate how hard it is going to be to find large numbers of new mods. Being thick-skinned enough to cope with being hated by so many people for so many contradictory reasons while also being flexible and responsive and ready to plough through piles of work for free isn’t a combination of qualities many people have…
If a lot of mods stopped using reddit, it would get absolutely inundated with actual regulatory attacks because it would get flooded with child porn, explicit harrassment, and nazis.
Any of the top 10 communities having enough mods resign would cause absolute havoc for reddit, yet they consistently screw over mods.
Oof, that’s an aspect I hadn’t even thought of. It may well be a total bin fire.