I see a lot of comments pointing out bugs and saying something along the lines like “they need to fix this ASAP, otherwise… something something”.
As a software developer myself (not in the fediverse), I can tell you one thing:
Keep in mind that all of this literally escalated pretty quickly, and no one was prepared for that. What started out as a hobby project of some enthausiasts, quickly turned into a high demand over the course of a few days.
Having hundreds of enthusiasts use a software is different than having thousends of “average” people using it. 100 users won’t detect many bugs, and if they do, they’re more tolerant since they know it’s all volunteering. But thousands of users will detect even more bugs that no one bothered to deal before.
Once the userbase grows and the demands are clear enough, this should be tackled, eventually.
So yeah, hang in there.
We all have to remember that each instance is either brand new or relatively young. I’m on kbin.social, which is run by one dude, @ernest, and before the big Reddit exodus i think kbin.social had something like 30 active users. It’s remarkable what he’s building here.
another part that I know from personal experience: you made something new, kinda tiny, not 100% there - you probably didn’t expect this to really take off (see fediverse in general), so you don’t go all the way to fix UX problems or annoying things - because your stuff may not ever be used by more than those few hundred people (which is a lot already for hobby projects), it may even die out in two years
and then the bomb drops and you have random users trying to use your side project
imagine linux would get adopted overnight by a few thousand windows users that didn’t like the windows 11 migration…
Absolutely! I’m on lemmy.world, there were less than 500 users when I joined 2 weeks ago, now there are 38K, crazy growth, both devs and admins are doing a fantastic job.