Thought that I would start off my first post in this place by getting this off my chest. In case anyone is wondering why more people haven’t flocked to Lemmy yet, this has been my experience so far.
Last night I decided to give this place a shot and sign up, just to be met with a join page that was mostly unresponsive and didn’t want to load anything. I ended up giving up and going to bed but thankfully by the morning, the web page had listed the possible servers for me to join.
So, especially after my experience the night before, I thought that the server that has in its description “recommended for users to join this server to reduce load” was a good start.
Then it came to looking for apps. I thought that the app with the description “made by Lemmy devs” would pair well with the server recommended to new users. Only to find that the server that I joined isn’t even listed in the app when I try to sign in. And that manually typing it does nothing but give “server error” responses as well.
So now here I am, typing this from my laptop, wondering how many other people try to join this platform and give up after the first couple of hoops that need jumping through first. I’m hoping that eventually I will find the right server and app combo to give me an actual complete, working experience but so far my experience here has been a little bit ridiculous.
Anyway, glad I got that off my chest. Hi Lemmy, just a Reddit refugee hoping to make a home here, once I’ve got this absolute circus of trying to get going here in the first place behind me.
Yeah, onboarding is a major bottleneck to jumping into lemmy.
I can’t say that’s a bad thing, but it does make it a barrier to large scale adoption.
That being said, I’m kinda surprised that jerboa didn’t work for you. I’ve never run into trouble manually entering instances, but it’s been a while since I used it. While it isn’t exactly the best app for lemmy, it’s the most reliable overall. Well, on android, no idea about iOS.
But, I noticed you said you were a sync user at reddit. Sync for lemmy is pretty reliable, though (as was the case with reddit) the developer does the whole no updates, then a single big one thing, so it can lag behind lemmy version updates a good bit. I’m using it right now, and it’s fully functional for a user. Can’t moderate on it. It also has some issues with markup handling, but every app has some quirk or another with that. That’s a lemmy thing tbh.
Connect is another reliable app, purpose built for lemmy. Boost and eternity (which was infinity before) are both essentially the same as the reddit versions. Summit and thunder are nice ones that are lemmy based. Tastes vary, but those are the ones I’ve liked most.
The good thing is, with that barrier to entry, you tend to not have as many idiots. The kind of folks that will sign up and spam shit while being an twerp because it’s easy to do tend to get filtered out. So the overall experience here is more fulfilling. Might want to avoid lemmy.ml, and hexbear if you aren’t pretty radically leftist, and just avoid lemmygrad entirely.