No it got popular because Reddit pissed a lot of people off temporarily. The only thing segregated instances does is confuse and upset the average person. Hell I host like 10 different alternative open source front ends for various websites and I fucking hate Lemmy instances. It makes Discovery new content unbelievably tedious.

What if I just want to browse communities? I can only do that on a per instant spaces, I have to go to that instance go to its communities tabs to browse and then if I find something I want I have to take its address and then go back to my own instance so I can subscribe to it with my account. That pisses me off and makes me not want to bother with it let alone the average user.

The sad state of reality is that centralized systems will always eventually get turned into corporate greed money machines but decentralized instances are by their very nature just shit and hard to work with and no one wants to put up with them.

[–] jackpot@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

the whole process needs to be improved, it's ridiculous as of now

[–] ReplicantBatty@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed, it was a steep learning curve just to even figure out how to use it. The concept of Lemmy is amazing but like you said, finding content is very unintuitive.

I think if there was some kind of database or reference for instances and the communities they have, it would be way easier to find what you're into. Somebody way smarter than me should look into that ;)

[–] Rolando@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

if there was some kind of database or reference for instances and the communities they have, i

well, theres this: https://browse.feddit.de/

edit: also this: https://lemmyverse.net/communities

[–] ReplicantBatty@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

Oooh thank you!

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

If it wasn't for instances, lemmy would just be lemmy.ml, filled with tankies, and unable to handle more than 10K people. You would never have joined.

The reddit exodus only caused people to leave reddit, not join lemmy. There have been dozens of reddit alternatives over the years and many of them were around at the time of the reddit exodus. Why do you think they all failed?

@kewwwi@lemmy.world

[–] kewwwi@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm here because reddit is fuck and my favorite reddit app converted to Lemmy, and I'm certain that was a bigger reason for lemmy's popularity growth than instances ever was

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

See my other reply