I made the mistake of checking Reddit (using my last few days of Apollo) and came across a complaint about Lemmy that flabbergasted me
Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?
To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
Reddit's UI and performance was pretty horrible for me in the browser. That being said, I find Lemmy's UI and performance worse. 😢
They definitely need to hire a real designer and work on performance. It's pretty bad when I try to subscribe to a community on lemmy.ml from lemmy.world. It takes like minutes for me for the request to go through.
The contrast between white and lime green is pretty bad too. The design makes the app feel cheap. That matters for a lot of people.
I honestly have a hard time using it outside of Jerboa. It's not just UI, but functionality issues as well. I don't blame people for being turned off. It's a big part of the reason why I don't think we'll see large scale adoption. And I don't even think the current way things are set up can handle large scale.
Lemmy is a good experiment, but I'm not sure this form of federation is going to work.