First of all I am super happy that such alternative exists but it's far from perfect due to many reasons and this is why I think it's not ready yet to absorb the influx of reddit users because many of them will just bounce off when they realize it.
My biggest gripes so far:
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Users are unable to block whole instances hence you either need to register with instance that already blocks unwanted instances (which is not perfect because it might block also those that you don't want to be blocked) or you need to block manually every single community there or you will be exposed to lemmygrad or other tankie instances. That's so basic feature I can't find any logical reasons that was not a thing since day 1.
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Lemmy is one of the least privacy friendly (unless you just use throwaways and disposable mail like you should) service I have ever stumbled upon and while it’s partially due to how federation works it’s just a fact that even reddit did that better because it was way easier to nuke your account and all traces (including nicknames in deleted comments, which is not a case on lemmy).
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There is no possibility to migrate or backup your subscribed/favorited stuff or even move it to another instance (which somehow is possible on Mastodon), so you basically have to trust that your instance won’t disappear overnight. Obviously any site can disappear, centralized or not but there are bigger chances that some random Joe will decide to close instance without saying anything than reddit closing down overnight without letting you copy your stuff. That’s even more annyoing if you consider that instance admin can restrict you from viewing instances they don’t like, hence you would need to create account on another instance and resubscribe to anything manually which is far from perfect.
What are your views on that for the time being?
In my limited experience over the past couple of days, I have not found myself wanting to block entire instances. What I did instead was subscribe to communities of interest to me and set my profile to show only those. It's interesting that people seem to get very worked up over which instances are evil…or something? At the end of the day, they're just servers right? Or am I missing something? I wouldn't make my home at a disreputable instance, but would still subscribe to a community if it has a good vibe. Is this a mistake?
The subscribing process itself does seem rather awkward. Why there can't simply be a subscribe button and you have to do that whole search for !community@wherever dance is unclear to me.
More to the point, it is open source and running it involves different instances. If the original programmers become too problematic, it will get forked. Plenty of people run their own instances and could block the .ml instance if they want. That's the intended nature of being open like it is.
I get your point and I usually do it the same way, however it's way easier to discover new and cool communities you didn't know before when you browse all instances. That's where having ability to ban lemmygrad and some other NSFW instances would help a lot. It should be user who decides.