Think about things from the point of view of someone who has never used Reddit or the fediverse, but you've heard about them both from recent news articles and want to see what they are about.
Reddit:- You Google Reddit and your first result is Reddit.com. You click the link and are presented with the front page. You from scroll from a few hours and end up signing up and staying.
Lemmy:- You Google Lemmy and your first result is a wiki article for Lemmy Kilmister... Your second result might be join-lemmy.org, which you're smart enough to realise it's probably more likely what the news is about.
You click join-lemmy.org and are presented with a page of information about the fediverse, links to set up a server and pictures of code...
There is very little chance you're going to investigate further.
If we want the fediverse to replace Reddit then either
A) Lemmy needs to improve its initial impression and Search engine optimization
B) We should be promoting a different platform with a better initial first impression.
I'd recommend kbin personally as it gives the same sort of experience as Reddit from the initial interaction.
kbin is newer and less polished. But yeah I personally recommend kbin over lemmy for exactly the reasons you posted.
Kbin doesn't have the ability to sort comments by top. To me, that is the #1 most important feature, and not having it when it's easy to do shows some real ignorance. The reason I come to these sites is to see the best comments on news of the day.
Top sorting is already available on the testnet. It will be further improved over time.
https://lab2.kbin.pub/
Well good news, friend! Here is the kbin source code. Since it's so easy to do I look forward to seeing your pull request sometime today 😀
@PlagueShip
@Fizzee @abff08f4813c
It’s new, it takes time… Reddit wasn’t Reddit at first, either
12 years ago reddit would crash all the time. To make it worse they always told me I was the one who broke reddit personally by putting a message on my screen. My bad yall.
Yeah, I always thought it was a little unfair when it popped up telling me that "Briguy24 broke reddit!". But I never held it against you, don't worry :)
reddit used to not have comments or even subreddits (Among the first ones were r/programming and r/NSFW, fwiw).
"..shows some real ignorance"?
Brother, acting like a douche to people who are working and paying for you to be here shows some real arrogance. You're not a customer here. There's no ad revenue, no data collection, no money. If you want it so bad then do it yourself. Beauty of the fediverse is you can go make your own instance that does what you want it to do.
"No money" well, there can be some if you donate to https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin as per the About page at the bottom of the page.
Even with the donations I doubt there's that much of a profit to being made. Servers are expensive, and there's no way that servers are the only overhead that ernest is dealing with.
His own knowledge, skills, abilities, and time are almost certainly worth more than he is receiving in donations. Dudes a skilled programmer/developer and is putting serious work into this. If he was putting his time and effort into freelance work instead he'd be building a heck of a nest egg.
Ignorance? Seriously?
To each their own but sometimes it's nice to just scroll through comments and see the varied replies instead of just fed the top/earliest on some posts. Imo it increases user engagement.
@plagueship Just so you know, the main dev @ernest replied to your concern
There is a bar at the top of the feed where you can switch how your feed is shown.
Rome wasn't built in a day
That's pretty lame friend
@BestOf might be of interest. The community sifts through the junk to share the most insightful comments.