Because you have to make a choice. If you go to a restaurant and say “I’d like a meal, please” they’ll make you choose one from the menu. It doesn’t matter to them which one you choose, you just have to choose.

In this case, some Lemmy instance needs to be the one where you sign in. Most of them probably don’t care if you choose them or not. But, if you want to use Lemmy, at some point you have to make a choice.

“Extremely” confusing?

Maybe to someone who has never once used email. But, even then, you could say “It’s like choosing a car, some look different, but they can all use the same roads.” If someone has never used a car, you could say “It’s like choosing a brand of underwear”. If they don’t use underwear, do we really want them here?

None of them really explained the user experience, and how different instances might affect it, let alone the existence of the local and global feeds and how your instance choice affects those

I almost never use the local feeds. Technically my instance choice does affect them, but I could switch to any other random Lemmy instance and the experience would be 99.99% the same for me.

To me it’s not forks vs. chopsticks, it’s someone looking at a fork with 3 tines instead of 4 and getting paralyzed not being able to decide between the two.

Everyone has heard of fire, water and grass, sure. Do they have any idea what that means in the Pokemon universe? I certainly hadn’t.

Not everyone is gonna immediately know what an instance is, or what it does, or what it’s there for

You know how you might use gmail and your friend might use outlook and you can just email no problem? Like that.

Is it really a “bad” experience?

A “bad” experience is something like applying for a job online, submitting your resume, then manually entering all the information that’s already on your resume into a thousand little boxes. A “bad” experience is trying to unsubscribe from a service that relies on the pain of that unsubscribe process keeping people paying every month.

Having to choose a server is at most a speed bump. Is it a “bad” experience to choose an email provider?

If that mild speed bump is keeping people from joining, that’s fine. If someone cared enough to make some kind of a GUI that hand-held people through the process of choosing a server, that’s fine too.

IMO, if we’re talking bad experiences, ads on Reddit that are designed to look like posts, that’s a bad experience. Ads that are designed to look like comments, that’s a bad experience. And, the feature coming soon of communities locked behind a paywall, that’s a really bad experience.

Well, you know those guys are extremists. Their slogan is literally “It’s Nerf or Nothin’!”

Nice. I was being lazy, I was thinking of writing my own add-on or tampermonkey script, but I didn’t get around to it. I should have known there was already one out there.

There’s still a lot of old, useful and informative posts on Reddit that I find via a Google search. It annoys me that whenever I find one of those posts, I have to go and edit the URL to be old.reddit instead of www.reddit otherwise it’s so hard to use. Like, the useful thing is in the comments, but the comments are collapsed by default, so if you search for something you won’t find it until you expand those comments.

If they get rid of old.reddit I think I’m going to end up using the wayback machine to get that old post rather than trying to use that horrible new reddit interface.

For a while I was reading and posting on Lemmy, but still going over to check things out on Reddit (without an account) because Lemmy just wasn’t getting enough traffic to keep interesting posts popping up. I’m having to do that less and less these days.

Especially important to understand decentralization when it comes to topics like piracy. Unlike Reddit, a non-commercial Lemmy instance isn’t going to be shut down by a CEO who is worried about how it might affect their ability to sell ads. But, admins can get threatened, they can get overwhelmed, they can get hit by a bus. It’s good to know how how to find other communities on other servers, etc.

Is this really just the “backup site”? Boo, I say. Boooooo.

Also, wasn’t Reddit banning links to Lemmy or something? Maybe that was only in the run-up to the IPO?

Edit: elsewhere in this thread people are saying that trying to link to lemmy.world fails, and trying to link to lemmy.ml fails, but you can still link to other lemmy instances?