While I do agree lemmy adds a layer or two of complexity compared to the simple “plug-and-play” reddit model, the article comes across as blaming all of the author’s lemmy-related issues on the software rather than admitting he just doesn’t understand how to use it.
Unlike Reddit’s approach of categorization using subreddits, Lemmy instances are mostly entire servers that act as catch-all versions of subreddits.
This is one example. Subreddits =/= instances. A more apt comparison would be communities, and then he can point out how communities are hosted by different instances. I mean, how did he miss that?
Another one is when he said there was no visual representation of “All” and “Local”. Just one look at an instance’s page shows you those options quite clearly.
Try as I might, I missed the curation and consolidation of Reddit, where content is batched up into similar topics.
Wait… What? That’s kind of exactly what’s happening in lemmy communities.
I may be biased, but despite lemmy’s many shortcomings/growing pains I feel the author should have acquired at least a basic understanding of how all this works before writing an article that points out “problems” when there is none.
Edit: I’m on mobile so it’s hard to quote every single line. But there were more than a few mistakes there.
Oh definitely. There are many things that lemmy needs to work on. It’s nowhere near as stable as reddit as it stands.
But the author was pointing out how reddit is better since it sorts topics by subreddits, implying that lemmy doesn’t do that (which is absolutely false).
As far as discovery and amount of content, I fully agree. Reddit just has much more users than lemmy. There’s no argument. Discoverability is also another aspect I’d love to be improved on in lemmy. If you’re in a small/new instance, you probably won’t see a ton of communities compared to a bigger one.
I’m pretty optimistic, though. I think we’re just getting started.