New to Lemmy and not a huge reddit user in the past and to me both are exactly the same amount of confusing (i.e. a bit).

Lemmy tell you, the article was from 16 June which was before many of the recent updates and the flurry of app development.

Since the twitter migration, mainstream media has had a pretty bad bias against the fediverse. I wouldn’t listen to anything from the media about any fediverse platform because they’re either driving at a preconceived critique (usually it’s too hard or unstable), or, don’t understand it … and I’m the sort of person that is very willing to critique the shit of the fediverse.

As to why there’s such a bias … probably a confluence of a few factors:

• Mainstream media doesn’t support actual journalism. So any article is probably written by someone on a tight deadline without enough time to actually understand the fediverse or even the will to do so.
• Mainstream media has had a cozy relationship with big-social, especially twitter (and facebook?), and generally feel like mass engagement based platforms are necessary for their business … and so the fediverse is, on some level, basically a threat to their livelihood.
• Going further … any form of media that is essentially non-profit and self-organised or hosted is probably a threat to mass media’s perceived livelihood, so even on an ideological basis, the core of the fediverse is something between dangerous, value-less or dumb. Therefore, any friction or tradeoff is almost immediately fatal to them.

While I do agree lemmy adds a layer or two of complexity compared to the simple “plug-and-play” reddit model, the article comes across as blaming all of the author’s lemmy-related issues on the software rather than admitting he just doesn’t understand how to use it.

Unlike Reddit’s approach of categorization using subreddits, Lemmy instances are mostly entire servers that act as catch-all versions of subreddits.

This is one example. Subreddits =/= instances. A more apt comparison would be communities, and then he can point out how communities are hosted by different instances. I mean, how did he miss that?

Another one is when he said there was no visual representation of “All” and “Local”. Just one look at an instance’s page shows you those options quite clearly.

Try as I might, I missed the curation and consolidation of Reddit, where content is batched up into similar topics.

Wait… What? That’s kind of exactly what’s happening in lemmy communities.

I may be biased, but despite lemmy’s many shortcomings/growing pains I feel the author should have acquired at least a basic understanding of how all this works before writing an article that points out “problems” when there is none.

Edit: I’m on mobile so it’s hard to quote every single line. But there were more than a few mistakes there.