<rant> Not responding directly, just piggy-backing for lack of a better place to put this comment.
The problem with Lemmy is that one gets sent to some place like https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances, is immediately confronted with a ton of weird links like "butts.international" and "badblocks.rocks", what even is this? And about 100000 other servers just named "lemmy", "notlemmy", and "lemmy1". So you click a few at random optimistically, then get hit with login page, or a server error, or an apparently empty test-server. You begin to think you're being pranked, like am I supposed to brute-force click like 50 things to find something that's not a joke? Maybe you go to https://join-lemmy.org/ and it says "After you create an account, you can find communities", so great, it's inaccessible anonymously, the same as twitter. You go to https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ and after 15m of page-loading get a hilariously useless cyberpunk-looking word-soup where you can't click any links, much less search for topics/communities (btw there are 2068431 running instances and somehow butts.international is still front and center in my cyberpunk view)
Finally, by ignoring recommended tooling and just using google-search I found a community relevant to my interests, but it has pretty bad content and a whopping 1 user/day. Another google search trying to find a certain topic, I find one, but it has only 3 total comments, and I could not tell what month/year the posts were added.
So, clearly I don't really know what I'm doing here, but this stuff is ridiculous. As long as we're crawling 2068431 instances why don't we look at the communities it hosts and the volume/recency of traffic? At least filter totally empty stuff and/or make it easier to get all the test instances in a sandbox! Discoverability is so bad that I can barely get to the point where I'm considering usability / content.
You're making a very good point. I looked at lemmy stuff before but I moved to kbin instead. It has a more familiar interface (to reddit) and it is federated with lemmy. This all sounds good and it is. But even there I basically have no idea what's going on. It has more content than the lemmy instances you visited but every once in a while when I remember to visit I only look at whatever landing page I configured and can't figure out what's kbin, what's lemmy, what "magazine" I am looking at etc. To be fair, it's already a pretty good product and it is likely to get a lot better. That's exactly why I keep trying.
As someone who signed up for Lemmy and is planning to replace my Reddit use with it, I hear these points loud and clear. You also make a good point about Google search and how bad it’s become - I see so many stories of people adding “Reddit” to their search in order to get any decent results. This is the natural result when you have every business paying people for SEO and trying to game the system.
Between account walls and search’s indexing problem, it’s become very hard to find small to mid sized active communities on your own. In fact this problem seems to be something people are trying to solve in Reddit communities via related subreddits on the sidebar.
So having gone from using search engine’s to crawl for relevant content that was out there, people are now creating content specifically to end up in Google’s search results - destroying the value search once had. Indicated by what people have done on Reddit, and these discussions about finding alternatives, it seems we are well on our way back to webrings. I welcome this.
Good example of irritating comment that led to the odyssey above. What you say also appears to not be true. The correct assertion is maybe: If you can find an instance, and if the instance is configured to allow anonymous, then you can browse communities. Since nothing is ranked or searchable, then if you're willing to do that for N instances and M communities, enduring server errors/login screens the whole way, maybe you can find decent content after weeks of brute-force labor. This isn't practical for someone who just wants to spend a few minutes finding a replacement for /r/math and /r/physics or whatever.
For the short term at least, since discoverability is so broken, I think those who want to advocate for Lemmy will be better served by just linking to content or curating indexes of active communities. It's not that useful to anyone if the focus is always about pretending everything is fine, or presenting prospective users with totally useless machine-generated indexes where we cannot tell the test-servers from production.
The problem with Lemmy is that one gets sent to some place like https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances, is immediately confronted with a ton of weird links like "butts.international" and "badblocks.rocks", what even is this? And about 100000 other servers just named "lemmy", "notlemmy", and "lemmy1". So you click a few at random optimistically, then get hit with login page, or a server error, or an apparently empty test-server. You begin to think you're being pranked, like am I supposed to brute-force click like 50 things to find something that's not a joke? Maybe you go to https://join-lemmy.org/ and it says "After you create an account, you can find communities", so great, it's inaccessible anonymously, the same as twitter. You go to https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ and after 15m of page-loading get a hilariously useless cyberpunk-looking word-soup where you can't click any links, much less search for topics/communities (btw there are 2068431 running instances and somehow butts.international is still front and center in my cyberpunk view)
Finally, by ignoring recommended tooling and just using google-search I found a community relevant to my interests, but it has pretty bad content and a whopping 1 user/day. Another google search trying to find a certain topic, I find one, but it has only 3 total comments, and I could not tell what month/year the posts were added.
So, clearly I don't really know what I'm doing here, but this stuff is ridiculous. As long as we're crawling 2068431 instances why don't we look at the communities it hosts and the volume/recency of traffic? At least filter totally empty stuff and/or make it easier to get all the test instances in a sandbox! Discoverability is so bad that I can barely get to the point where I'm considering usability / content.