Yes, that's exactly it: the discoverability. I joined a small to medium server, and I thought that Pixelfed's search would be like the one in Mastodon: search for a hashtag and get results from all of the other federated servers, but no. The search function doesn't seem to work with hashtags, so subscribing to one is a pain.
And the available apps are not very good. And the official one hasn't been released yet.
Besides Lemmy, I have a Mastodon account. I'm not very active, though. I'm also on BlueSky, but because most of the post where uninteresting to me I uninstalled the app months ago and hadn't logged in since. And I'm exploring Pixelfed, but my experience hasn't been so good.
Some weeks ago I tried to install Arch on an old laptop, and since it have been many years since I've installed Arch for the last time, and I've heard good things about archinstall, I decided to try it. Nothing fancy: single drive, LXQt, no encryption, auto partitioning...
I tried maybe 4 or 5 times, configuring different settings in the script, and every single time it gave me a broken installation: no GRUB, or no display manager, or incorrect video driver (Intel, no Nvidia here). I supposedly configured all the options correctly, but I never got a working system. In the end I snapped and searched for some video tutorial and installed Arch the old way. I have no desire to use that script again, at least for a long time.
"Updated README"
But people in the 90s were doing their work just fine, with that same UX paradigm. What's the difference now?
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that software's UI and UX doesn't need to evolve. But it bothers me that a perfectly usable UI gets criticized only because it's "old" and doesn't look "modern" (tf is a "modern UI", btw?).
What's wrong with the 90s UX? It lets you do your work without being intrusive or annoying, so what's wrong with it?
Melodysheep moment. Their content is simply amazing.
I mean, I mentioned that my experience with Pixelfed has not been the best, since it lacks content and discoverability. I wouldn't sign up again to Instagram (I deleted my accounts years ago), but it's obvious that it has orders of magnitude more content, and maybe the recommendation algorithm can be useful sometimes.
Personally, even if I don't want to, I have to use WhatsApp since everyone in my country uses it, even government offices.