I mean, almost all social media has a learning curve but Lemmy is one that if you don't put in the effort you're not going to learn it and use it. It's not seamless to master.
Design for it is an offshoot of what developers made that work for them. There's a gap between that and what the lay person who grew up with phone apps are willing to put up with.
I know Lemmy will grow and develop. But there's going to be a bleed off of active users from these waves of new members. I'm hoping that the communities grow fast and that the phone app is designed with the average high school kid or octogenarian in mind.
If I wasn't a kid who grew up figuring out driver issues or the blue screen of death in Windows all of the time I may have moved on after my first couple of hours with Lemmy.
Truly. I want to see the platform grow and flourish. But it has some hurdles.
This obfuscation of who works for who via a series of subcontracts is horrible. I personally know of the janitorial BS that got started by Winters Cleaning and the cinema industry in the 90s. There's an article that Variety did on it some years back. It's about removing responsibility from the company benefitting from the labor. It increases the likelihood that impoverished, desperate people will be taken advantage of. When problems are noticed the last company in the line of subcontractors just fold up. No one is held accountable.
If Amazon has deep control of operations due their contracts, then yes, Amazon is their employer.