As I’ve said above, it’s not OpenOffice you want, it’s LibreOffice, please don’t download OpenOffice. https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-letter-to-apache-openoffice/

Nope you can’t access them to discourage people from using Reddit, that’s the protest.

The whole point is that you can’t access them.

As a Dvorak user, Dvorak is pretty terrible for single-finger typing since the focus is on hand-alternation. If I had the choice I’d probably choose this.

There have been layouts developed for single or limited-finger use and I think it’s a shame they never caught on.

As a power user, who uses spreadsheets every day professionally, OnlyOffice isn’t full-featured enough for my needs. LibreOffice is the only free software that’s adequate for my job.

That’s because America has woken up. Given that the blackout was planned for 2 days I’m actually quite encouraged that there are still 6500 after then. Even many of the ones that have opened have opened pending further discussion on the next steps. I’m not optimistic about the overall outcome for Reddit, but the more people that can be driven to alternatives the better.

Fewer than I thought though, I would have thought the whole thing would have evaporated by now.

I presume they could but then those subs would be unmoderated which would be a huge legal risk.

Apache OpenOffice hasn’t had a major release since 2014 whereas LibreOffice, its de facto successor, is actively developed and modern.

Unfortunately OpenOffice still has name recognition which leads casual users to still download it as a replacement to commercial office suites, despite being very out of date. It’s kind of become a bit of an embarrassment to open source software and really should be discontinued, but a small handful of developers insist on keeping it on life support.

See this open letter https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-letter-to-apache-openoffice/

This seems to be really dated, shouldn’t really be promoting things like OpenOffice now.

Mastodon STILL has UX issues, and the rest of ActivityHub and the Fediverse are impenetrable to the average person. That will change over time, but in the meantime, I can’t even get people to use Signal for god’s sake, let alone explain which Lemmy instance is best for them.

Wouldn’t it make it so much worse? If getting people to sign up for a Lemmy instance is a hard sell, it would be even harder telling them that they’ve now got to choose an instance that doesn’t federate with Meta stuff. (unless you’re fine with letting Meta in, which I’m not).

A relatively small thing: the 500-comment viewing limit for normal accounts. So many times on Reddit I’ve been put off engaging with posts with 500+ comments knowing that nobody would see it. It’s stupid because comments are just text and unless the software design is absolutely terrible then simple text comments shouldn’t take up bandwidth at all.

I’ve tried it out before but never seriously attempted to engage with it. I’m intending on using the downtime of the Reddit blackout, and the recent spike in interest, to give it a fair go and see.

I was unaware of being able to comment on Lemmy posts with a Mastodon account.

Thanks for your reply. I feel like I 90% get the concept of federalisation, and it’s very interesting. Just from a purely user experience point of view (because this is what was asked), I’ve already had several times where I’ve ended up on the “wrong” instance without realising it. I guess it partly takes getting used to. My experience has been more positive than negative overall though.

Interface is better than “new” Reddit, not as good as old Reddit + RES.

Also: if I click on a link on another instance (for example https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy when I’m signed in on lemmy.world), I’m not signed in to lemmy.ml so I have to manually search for it in lemmy.world to post there - is there a common solution to that?

Kind of cautiously optimistic at this stage, Reddit has been going steeply downhill for the last few years - if the “blackout” does nothing for Reddit then maybe it could succeed in drawing attention to alternatives.