Reddit is profiting a lot from the network effect. By now this reddit is a known brand, has a lot of content is already there, has a lot of people (especially non-technical users) are already on reddit, and they're there to stay.
All the other reddit alternatives, including lemmy and/or the fediverse suffers from:
Bugs (I love lemmy, but gosh, have you seen how buggy and sometimes unresponsive it is?)
The complexity of "servers" (don't get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
Lack of content
Lack of users
Everybody is talking about the Digg exodus, but nobody is saying that it didn't happen in a day, it took ~1 to 2 years.
The complexity of “servers” (don’t get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
I'll admit the technical stuff is probably the most off-putting. Most major social media got where it is by being idiot proof. The whole set-up will need to be much more streamlined if they want to really dip into Reddits user base.
For example, join-lemmy.org should do this, IMHO, without any technicality. Just transparently register to random server, with a curated cross-servers pre-selected list of subscriptions. Once users are distributed across servers, people will just recommend friends/family to join their own server, then the centralization of join-lemmy.org won't become an issue. But I might be utopian.
Reddit is profiting a lot from the network effect. By now this reddit is a known brand, has a lot of content is already there, has a lot of people (especially non-technical users) are already on reddit, and they're there to stay.
All the other reddit alternatives, including lemmy and/or the fediverse suffers from:
Everybody is talking about the Digg exodus, but nobody is saying that it didn't happen in a day, it took ~1 to 2 years.
I'll admit the technical stuff is probably the most off-putting. Most major social media got where it is by being idiot proof. The whole set-up will need to be much more streamlined if they want to really dip into Reddits user base.
I think the solution is a central registration which selects a random server from https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
For example, join-lemmy.org should do this, IMHO, without any technicality. Just transparently register to random server, with a curated cross-servers pre-selected list of subscriptions. Once users are distributed across servers, people will just recommend friends/family to join their own server, then the centralization of join-lemmy.org won't become an issue. But I might be utopian.