Jesus christ, dude. I’m here scrolling through posts at 2 AM in a dark room because I’m having trouble sleeping, and this picture scared the shit out of me. RIP my chances of going to sleep any time soon.

Yep. Certified non-tech nerd here. And not quite 30, either.

I was awfully close to not figuring out Lemmy enough to make an account and participate.

I still don’t understand exactly what’s going on, but I can confirm that my first time visiting was extremely confusing. So many terms I was completely unfamiliar with, and no clear way for me to jump in easily (like you were describing with having to make important decisions before signing up/understanding). Truly the only reason I ended up successfully making it here was that I saw a post on the instance I ended up joining, welcoming reddit refugees so I figured - well, I guess I could try this one. And that was after I had searched around online to figure out what the heck the fediverse, instances, etc, were.

The barrier to entry is really high for those of us with little to no tech knowledge. And I was really motivated, I reeeeally wanted to commit to leaving reddit. I imagine those who are considering joining but aren’t quite as motivated just won’t make it. :(

Yeah they’re great! I got a super long flat white one and those little white plastic staple things you can lightly hammer into the wall, and ran it along the baseboard of the walls, makes it nearly invisible! It was a bit tedious to do (which is why I haven’t yet redone it in the place I live now, although I will), but honestly I super recommend it. My partner wanted to try and run cords through the walls but I was way too nervous about what might go wrong, so found this solution instead lol

OMG. And this is how I learned that there is a button to view only my subscribed communities. I can’t believe I didn’t realize that before. I was confused why so few of my subscribed communities were showing up on my front page, while communities I wasn’t interested in were, but I didn’t stop to think about it enough to realize there was another option I hadn’t tried.

Lord. Anyway, thank you for mentioning that, otherwise who knows how long it would’ve been before I finally realized lol.

But, I think part of the issue is that communities that folks are interested in being a part of, about certain topics/etc, just aren’t active enough here yet. I’m glad to see some are growing, and my personal experience is improving over time, but I keep finding communities that look like something I’d love but have zero activity ir content in them. So I do understand folks wanting to fill parts of this with content in general, even if it’s content similar to what they would’ve gotten on Reddit, because content and activity is what will help build those cool communities over time.

I only wish I had interesting or important things to contribute to the communities I’m interested in, I never know what to say or do to help build a community that’s nonexistent or essentially so. 😥 so far I’ve just been commenting wherever I can, for the most part, hoping that helps.

No, I agree with you on this also. I am not the original commenter here, but I was just scrolling through “all” and I do agree that it’s a little annoying to see ~90% of the page filled with posts about reddit. But I’m also someone willing to participate in discussions about reddit still, at least a little, so I imagine it’s way more annoying to those who just want to forget about it.

I didn’t even notice what community or instance this post was in when I opened it to participate in lol

Not sure there’s really a good solution though, and comments/posts from people complaining about everything being about reddit is also adding to the total number of things about reddit. I assume the constant reddit focus will fade out over time as other communities slowly build up more activity.

Same! I went to check it out earlier and the frontpage had a couple of subreddits I recognized but am not interested in, and the rest were all subreddits I had never heard of before. I also thought the scores seemed weirdly low, but not 100% sure about that since I dont usually pay super close attention. At least the weird vibe was pretty helpful in getting me to hop off, versus getting sucked in to browsing around more.

What! I didn’t know that, and I just gave one of my cats a little crocheted ball yesterday. I hadn’t made it for them, but one of them was obsessed with it quickly so I figured I’d let him have it. BRB going to find it and take it away, I had no idea, thank you for mentioning this!!!

Oh shit no way, I didn’t know that? Is that the case for most of the random reddit bots? For some reason hearing that the RemindMe bot is dead as well makes me extra sad 😥

Oh, I guess today is a good day to become anxious that it might be my last day with 10 fingers. 🙃

Great idea! I haven’t seen any others mentioning this in all the protest discussions I saw. Hopefully others did similarly, that seems like something that could really help.

I’m a little curious how many folks working at reddit have secretly moved over to Lemmy (or other similar site) during all of this

Eh, I think discussing potential improvement ideas isn’t harmful, as long as it’s done respectfully. IMO, that’s how you figure out the best improvements, with people sharing different perspectives/opinions/etc. Most of the discussion I’ve seen about Lemmy so far has been like that, not demanding changes or being rude to the developers (in fact, most of the sentiment I’ve seen towards the developers/hosts of instances has been super positive, which is great). I don’t think that folks entering the community should feel unwelcome to voice their opinions, even if others might disagree or those in charge don’t choose to make those changes in the end. But seeing folks talking about these things and seeing the number of people in support or against something might help someone in charge realize that maybe some change or update would actually be really beneficial to their site, and end up helping them make something their even more proud of. Although, I can imagine a huge influx of people to any site like this, along with the sudden boom in corresponding discussions, is pretty crazy to deal with if you’re the creator(s) of said site.

Well huh. I did not in fact know this, and was wondering why there were so few subscribers to most communities or even zero sometimes. Feels like changing this to include all subscribers would be really helpful?

I was scrolling through “all” and thought this was a legit ad at first 😅

That’s one of the things I’ve been most excited about so far - it sorta feels like I’m back on an old ~2005 forum again, it’s weirdly nostalgic and nice!