I don't know if you've noticed this, but threads or comments about Lemmy or the Fediverse get downvoted a lot on Reddit and trolls who claim that it's "dogshit" and "not going anywhere" get systematically upvoted.
Some of those trolls get then exposed when you ask them what Lemmy instance they tried and one of them with whom I had a surreal exchange answered with something like "yeah ofc I used Lemmy, this is the instance: join-lemmy.org" ๐คฆโโ๏ธ
It's frustrating that these trolls keep contributing to the big lie that "Lemmy is not ready yet" and that there's "no viable alternative to Reddit".
This and the overwhelming number of comments being "against the mod protests" just prompts me to question whether there isn't some brigading being organized straight from the Reddit HQ.
They could be legit users, FWIW, and just not understanding Lemmy enough to know what an "instance" is. Nowhere else on the internet (except Mastodon) is it a "thing" to have different instances of the same site iteracting.
Half of my comments are about Lemmy not being ready yet, or a viable alternative to Reddit. It's not a "big lie". I'm currently relying on the hover-over text to know where the icons are, brcause they're not loading for some reason. I'm confident that decentralised social media will never take off, brcause the point of social media is to bring people together rather than stick them on different servers.
To be viable, alternatives don't need to function exactly like reddit. I think what you're referring to (aside from the icons not loading, which is a symptom of temporary server growing pains) is mostly discomfort with a new thing functioning slightly differently. Once you spend a couple of days using lemmy, the decentralized nature of it starts feeling much less foreign and is actually kinda cool for lots of reasons. Being on different servers doesn't mean we can't still come together; the fediverse enables us to come together to an extent that is unheard of with proprietary sites like reddit.
I hope you can give yourself some time to acclimate, I think you'll really start enjoying it here!
The point of the fediverse also is to bring people together and to not stick them on different servers - its to let people come together without all having to be on one persons server
I understand that that's the point of it, but it runs contrary the network effect that makes social media valuable, and creates too much of a barrier of entry to new users.
When Twitter became woefully unpopular, I heard several different podcasters say something along the lines of "For now we're still on Twitter. We'll move onto Mastodon once I work out how to use it", and none of them ever joined. If content creators don't join a network because it's too difficult to join compared to other networks, then content consumers will have no reason to join either.
It's no coincidence that the biggest community on lemmy.ml is Linux.