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?
Developed by tankies :(
yep, but it's free and open source so they don't have any real power, if they try to lock it down and censor opinion, it would just be forked and life will go on as normal. Also the influx of attention and the competition from the kbin project have led to a huge number of new contributors to the codebase, so it's a pretty fair and democratic project in that regard.
Normal people will just tend towards instances that block federation with extremist communities so I don't see it as a problem.
If it were developed by alt-righters instead they probably wouldn't have made it open source, that's commie stuff lol.
People say this as if free and open-source software isn't a 95% leftist concept in the first place. You should be glad that the devs aren't capitalists—it means they won't be chasing revenue like Reddit.
Let them cook.