Nothing agains this place, but it is VERY cumbersome to get going. Squabbles seems super responsive and intuitive. I’ll be using both!
I liked it briefly when I logged in but as someone on reddit pointed out, the owner encouraged others to astroturf bringing new users to the site which feels kinda icky given the way other users have also bashed lemmy alongside it.
That sounds exactly like my experience with MeWe. I investigated them as part of the team of Goodreads refugees who were looking for a new home after the Amazon takeover. MeWe functioned as a cult, and they were (are) a walled garden. Numbers were constantly urged to recruit, recruit, recruit.
But when search engines can’t see your community or your posts, and you can’t even share links except to members, there’s no future. Nothing you write will ever go viral. Nobody will ever stumble upon something great that you rode and decide to get involved or to follow you.
I use it sometimes. Apart from the non-federated aspect, there is a cultish mentality in some users there, which I find very annoying.
Seems pointless to switch to a different closed-source, centralized platform. Why would this be any different from Digg or Reddit? Switching to a federated system is the only way to make sure that cycle doesn’t repeat.
