I don’t mean to be pessimistic, bit since most subreddits are only going dark for a couple days, the site will basically be back to normal soon. I wonder how many users here are only here because of temporary outrage and not because they actually prefer Lemmy. I’m curious about people’s outlook on this situation.
We need to educate users and Reddit people to really understand how Lemmy works, and why it’s good. People keep giving the email analogy but that may not be enough. I still see a lot of users asking if they need to have an account on every Lemmy instance. We need to explain simply that :
I like that image that visually represents how subreddits live inside one giant Reddit circle, but communities on Lemmy live inside several circles. You can access all subreddits, and you can access all communities, as far as the users need to be concerned with there’s no difference except for more variety.
But for that to truly be easy to use the apps and web interface need major leaps forward.
I feel like that last sentence is the most important for me. I was a Reddit /r/all lurker. I just kind of wanted something to look at, latest news, etc. It’d be nice if I could just sign up under an instance which is focused on providing that basic content. Trying to find communities and subscribe to them is a little cumbersome.
Also, though, I’m concerned about scalability. If every Lemmy user wants to subscribe to something like “latest news”, aren’t they all going to want to sub to the same community on the same instance? Isn’t that instance going to become prohibitively expensive to run?