Why do people say it’s too confusing to catch on?

I have no fucking idea.

This just seems to highlight a problem. People are saying they’re confused by it. But if you’re either unaware why or acting like you’re unaware why, that’s a problem. Even if there are ways to approach using Mastodon that makes it easy, there’s clearly something making many users pause.

Yeah, especially since you could have smaller, niche subs on Reddit, but those largely don’t work here. The niche subs were some of my favourite.

There’s also some niche subs that need the site to be popular. Eg, AITA or BestOfLegalAdvice (which required LegalAdvice to be mainstream).

IMO ideally there’d be two separate options. I want to block stuff like foreign language instances or some niche instances so that I don’t see communities hosted on them, but I don’t want to block the users from those instances when they post in other communities.

Blockchain 🤮

Because using random tiny servers is worse in other ways. With all due respect, nobody knows you and they don’t know how committed you are or how much time you have. When your server gets DDoSed or hits a bug causing data loss, what will you do? Do you have the technological know-how to recover and quickly? If your server suddenly grew and it became more expensive to run, how does anyone know if you will keep paying the bills? If Lemmy has a bad zero day, will you upgrade quickly?

There’s no need to answer these questions. I’m not actually asking you personally. But these are the kinds of questions that users have to worry about from random, small, unproven instances.

(Also, Lemmy does not favour small instances because the “all” feed, searching, and going to new communities are all better the more diverse users you have.)

I don’t understand the appeal of no downvotes. Do you really think it’s a good thing that trolls, bigots, dangerously wrong answers, general assholes, spam, etc can’t be downvoted? I won’t pretend downvotes aren’t misused sometimes, but their existence is critical for quality control.

Edit: wait, I just saw you post in another thread as an “enlightened centrist”, so I guess that explains it.