Setup was a pain in the ass for me, but I was determined not to return to reddit after the API changes. I’m tech-savvy enough to build a PC, format/partition disks, and provide tech support for my extremely confused mother, but Mastadon was so off-putting that I jumped ship during setup, and Lemmy had a learning curve that the average person may not be willing to figure out.

Even my brother who is familiar with using Tor and such couldn’t quite figure out Lemmy. He wound up joining (what I assume was) one of the shitty instances right after the first large migration, and it must have been defederated for one reason or other because he denounced the rampant censorship and went back to reddit. If he were right wing or a Nazi I could probably connect the dots there, but my brother is even further left than I am. He actually got me into politics while he was campaigning for Bernie Sanders. So I’m not exactly sure what soured his experience more-so than the initial setup (which he also struggled to wrap his head around).

I suspect he didn’t understand why his instance was defederated, and just saw the people around him complaining that it had happened. Kind of a bummer because he introduced me to Sync and would fit in really well here, but something went awry.