I mean, almost all social media has a learning curve but Lemmy is one that if you don’t put in the effort you’re not going to learn it and use it. It’s not seamless to master.
Design for it is an offshoot of what developers made that work for them. There’s a gap between that and what the lay person who grew up with phone apps are willing to put up with.
I know Lemmy will grow and develop. But there’s going to be a bleed off of active users from these waves of new members. I’m hoping that the communities grow fast and that the phone app is designed with the average high school kid or octogenarian in mind.
If I wasn’t a kid who grew up figuring out driver issues or the blue screen of death in Windows all of the time I may have moved on after my first couple of hours with Lemmy.
Truly. I want to see the platform grow and flourish. But it has some hurdles.
I think this is the key takeaway with every argument made in this way. People follow content, the content is the actual thing people use any of these services for. People today still use IRC and Usernet. Obviously we don’t want systems to be ridiculously complex, but if the “goal” is to be mainstream then this project is total waste of time. Thankfully that isn’t the goal, and the fediverse, I feel, has already proven to be successful. It’s different, and its differences are why people use it.