This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
It’s depressing how many top level comments or replies are about how people like that there is a technical barrier gatekeeping lemmy. Are yall actually leftists or do you just pretend to be while worshipping your own version of social hierarchy in which us nerds are on top?
Why is “drama” on Lemmy always highly exaggerated by people?
“Endless wars of who federates with who”. What is that person even talking about and who the fuck would even care as a normal user?
Been using Lemmy for a couple of years, not seen this once.
Also, the ux is pretty much the same as Reddit.
These people are just stakeholders in Reddit. They are afraid of change, or losing any rep they have. They sit on a pile of useless upvotes.
I think a lot of people that think the UX is different from reddit weren’t on reddit 14 years ago when it did look very similar to this.
I barely remember reddit on PC. Except for people trying to convince me bitcoin would be valuable - and me thinking they were foolish. I would have sold at $25, anyways.
Really? You never ran into the endless “…furthermore, .ml must be defederated” posts?
There are a few .world posters who make two to three posts a day about how much they hate lemmygrad hexbear and .ml.
you will probably stop seeing much of that if you block users that post a lot to fediverselore and meanwhileongrad. They’re like the /r/subredditdrama of lemmy
Well that’s just a waste of time really.
When half the posts in your feed are “X instance bad” people get just tired and go out.
It has happened to me sometimes a meaningful part of my feed was just people brigading about some instance they don’t like. It’s ridiculous.
Not necessailly federation, but I’ve seen a lot of people prejudge commenters for what instance they’re a part of, most commonly calling people from .ml or hexbear tankies just for being on .ml or hexbear. It gets old really quickly.
Really early on like right after the API fuckfest, there was a large influx of users who picked servers based on whatever. As a result, servers defederated and there was a lot of drama as a result.
Though that said I haven’t heard much about defederating in some time.
What would prevent the same happening in the next wave of rats jumping ship? They don’t know anything about the servers or their niches, so they pick whatever. Listing all the servers and their missions is a good start for those motivated to join, but for those more on the fence, how do we ease the transition?
I personally see three big issues with getting new users to Lemmy use and stat on Lemmy:
- knowing about it: It is a matter of time before Reddit bans linking to Lemmy. Either by outright preventing their discussion via shadow deletes or full deletes. join-lemmy.org would be well served by purchasing ads on Google and on Bing
- join-lemmy ux needs to be improved: this goes to your point and I fully agree that there needs to be a better onboarding experience. I am a fairly technical guy and even I had trouble understanding the major concepts behind Lemmy. Many of these concepts aren’t terribly important to a new user though. At least at first.
- more and better content: this is fortunately getting better but we’re not there yet
Join-lemmy provides a subpar experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536
Pull requests are more than welcome to improve the site. Its basic Typescript, TailwindCSS and Inferno.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site
You can also make changes to the documentation, its markdown just like Lemmy itself. So if you would write something differently then open a pull request and change it!
Thanks for reminding.
I’m more busy on [email protected] at the moment but I might give it a go at some point.
Just seems strange to have so many people wanting to fix this in this thread without actually acting
Exactly it seems most people here still didn’t realize that this is an open source project run by volunteers, not a corporation with countless employees and a profit motive. If people want something to get done then it’s best they start doing it themselves.
For the majority of commenters: UX is not UI.
The poor UX experience is the research a person has to do before they can even participate. You need to have a basic understanding of how the network works, and then you have to shop around for a server.
It’s enough friction to prevent people from on-boarding and that’s not good for a platform that needs people to be valuable.
I disagree. I just found a link to lemmy.world, with no idea of how lemmy worked, and I’m perfectly happy. To me it seems like people’s endless complaints about servers come down to personal issues.
It’s like politics, hahaha. Those who don’t trouble themselves with too many details remain content with whatever they their emotions dictated while those who do research, sort out real facts, read reviews, understand the platform details live the next four years in constant anxiety
It’s actually a good point. To scale up we need to reach beyond nerds , find a populist voice
it feels like old reddit
Wait, when did that become a bad thing? I exclusively browsed old.reddit.com because the new layout is a fucking abomination.
That’s the feature! Not a bug.
The new reddit design sucks and always has, other than dark mode.
Unless we fix the UX problems in Lemmy, a Bluesky-like alternative of reddit is going to pop up, and overtake Lemmy, like what happened with Mastadon
Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it ‘wars’.
As for UX, there’s definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstance without explicitly subbing to them all or using lemmyverse.net.
But I don’t think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.
If that was a legitimate issue, MMO’s (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn’t have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.
Even if Lemmy was one big simple centralized server, that user would just come up with another reason they couldn’t switch.
“Oh, it’s too small, my niche communities aren’t there”
“The UI isn’t as nice”
“The mod tools aren’t as good”
Etc.
I specifically remember looking up tables of who defederates from who and what instances allow NSFW or downvoting because this was an issue among some of the top instances back then.
I ended up making 4 different accounts over 2 months until I landed on a server I’m happy with. That will never be acceptable to any normal user.
Every time someone brings up these issues, people here downplay them like you are doing it right now and nothing is ever done about it.
This, the survivor bias is absurdly high around lemmy.
This is my fourth instance because, for some reason, it’s extremely hard to find an instance that defeds the 3 main propaganda instances, allows porn/hentai, piracy talk, weed and isn’t too pissy about downvotes.Still I am thinking about leaving lemmy due to a complete lack of content for my country other than government propaganda… And I don’t feel comfortable creating a community for the same reason and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else from my country so… Nobody who cared about it (or who could help me mod).
defeds the 3 main propaganda instances, allows porn/hentai, piracy talk, weed and isn’t too pissy about downvotes.
You indeed made the good choice, Lemmy.cafe is the one
Still I am thinking about leaving lemmy due to a complete lack of content for my country other than government propaganda…
Why not use both Lemmy and another platform?
You indeed made the good choice, Lemmy.cafe is the one
Yeah, it only took me 4 tries and I still am ready to jump ship if needed.
Why not use both Lemmy and another platform?
Already am, but at least on Reddit the mods can pretend to ban/control the propaganda accounts, but over here they are the only ones posting content (for my country) and that’s tiring… the rest of the content is the same here and Reddit, so I feel more inclined to stay on Reddit since I don’t really post anything anyway (I don’t even comment over there anymore) and Lemmy feels like something I rather delete more and more… been thinking about PieFed, but the same problem as everything Fediverse, I have to pick a goddamn instance and I don’t have energy for that for now.
If it helps, the issue is much less prominent for PieFed. Pick https://piefed.social/ bc it is the flagship and new features will just magically appear every week or so (not joking! the pace of development really is that fast!) Also it’s easier to not have to start the community joining process for every community - that one being (by far) the largest for PieFed means that more often than any other instance, that work will have been done for you.
Also, when you join, you will become energized about the Fediverse again - the startup wizard helping you pick communities to subscribe to based off of your interests will make you happy:-). Whether it’s worth the pain of learning a whole new system after that or not… is up to you, but seriously if you need that jolt of positivity, sign up TODAY! (you can always abandon it tomorrow, though I hope you won’t, and am betting that actively seeing it in front of you may help… although tbf there is a bit of a learning curve as you adjust, and yet only bc there’s so much MORE you can do with PieFed, like Lemmy has just Subscribed vs. All, whereas PieFed has a whole slew of new options to add to that, in the Topics, in choosing to receive Notifications for content rather than have to navigate to it, and new stuff is coming like personalized multi-communitied as well - it kinda really is awesome and exciting!? 😊)
I really really doubt the part about the content based on my interests part, I’ve tried Lemmy, Mastodon and Pixelfed, none of the has any content that I care about enough to join a community but they have way too much US politics (WAY TOO MUCH), so it really doesn’t encourages me to try anything new on the fediverse (like Loops, picking an instance, creating user just to find no content for me?).
I’d like to know how good or bad the instance block works on PieFed, because here on lemmy I still see hexbear posts that other users crosspost, even when my instance already defederated that instance.US politics (WAY TOO MUCH)
Piefed has built in keywords filters, that can help
In addition to keyword filters that Blaze mentioned, PieFed is basically the only way I know of, other than an app (Sync or Connect) that offers a true instance filter that blocks all users from the specified instance, without requiring admin support. I’ve blocked all those batshit insane comments from lemmy.ml and now if I go to the same identical posts, those comments from those users from those instances that you specify are flat gone. Regardless of the community. More in this post but that’s basically it that I’ve said already.
Likewise, Categories of Communities allows you to have your cake and (when you want it) eat it too. e.g. check out https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft and note absence of it, in that category. Likewise https://piefed.social/topic/fediverse, and https://piefed.social/topic/food, and https://piefed.social/topic/gaming, and so on. But, in the very rare event that you ARE wanting it (hey, it happens!) it’s still accessible at https://piefed.social/topic/news (& politics).
I would be remiss if I did not tell you that PieFed isn’t fully completed yet - it both has features that Lemmy (and even Reddit!) lacks, while also missing some, like its search feature is pretty abysmally bad (on purpose, it just hasn’t been the top priority yet, to receive some love and attention:-). Though I still love it even so. You can keep your old account (to do things that PieFed cannot yet), and eventually you should find yourself using the new perhaps 90% of the time, as you adjust and come to love what it can do for you - though note that I find that the approach to finding content is quite different from when I used Lemmy, which only offers Subscribed vs. All, whereas PieFed has so many more options to choose from (it may be overwhelming at first - but it’s so fantastic to have choices!:-).
Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
Not necessarily, but we don’t want a accidental filter that filters out non tech savvy people. We want all kinds of people on Lemmy
Has software usage really gotten to the point where the average person can’t handle being given a choice about anything? Where it’s just too much effort to do anything more than mindlessly click on whatever is presented to them? 🤦
Unfortunately yes. And there is no going back.
Is there even a point to which one you pick? I just picked .kbin because I liked the UI, and when that fell apart I moved to .world mostly at random.
Is there really a large difference between them?
I picked world cuz it was by far the biggest at the time
These people must have been paralyzed with fear when they had to choose an email provider.
I doubt they even know there’s anything other than gmail.
Joining is a bad experience. “Please commit now to a server on this service you know nothing about… Then you can try it out!” I understand the concept of decentralization, but it’s ass-backwards…
This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s
“but it feels like old reddit”. My god, imagine actively preferring the new reddit UI. Let them keep their shiny jangling keys instead of coming over here and pestering the devs for a snoovatar feature or whatever nonsense.
The ‘maybe read for 2 minutes to figure it out’ miniscule barrier to entry is a feature not a bug.
I don’t get how people get hung on choosing a server when people have been chosing a starter Pokémon since 1998 without any major issues. And you get just about the “same” amount of practical info.
Really, what tiktok does to a generation…
Reading these comments I feel a sense of dread. You are all experiencing survivor bias. Initially when I ran into barriers I gave up for like a year before bothering to try Lemmy again.
If you don’t want Lemmy to serve as an actual counter to corporate controlled social media if it means letting in “normies” then you are content with corporate controlled social media continuing to dominate our lives. Which sounds about right for humanity. The smugness is vile.
Just bring on the vacuum decay event already.
This post can be taken as-is with “Lemmy” replaced with “Linux”, and I fucking hate it. So many people despise the idea of “normies” coming to what they love as if they’re the reason things got so bad. This stuff could be so great if they were actually made for everyone.
Whether these are just lazy excuses or not, but let’s be real for a moment.
Imagine someone, who’s used to go to reddit.com, search for a reddit app in the app store, both of which have the same logo, design, etc… and use their username/password to login and browse the content.
almost every service, that people use for the last decades is based on this specific approach, except for emails. Even the TLD was always .com
Now imagine, how overwhelmed those people might feel, when you tell them “just come over to lemmy”.
Lemmy, where? lemmy.com? Here’s where you then start explaining the different instances, federation, etc…
the next question will be: where’s the Lemmy app? Remember, the unified logo and design? well, good luck explaining that all lemmy apps are de facto third-party-apps.
Now, once they make it throug all of that, the next hurdle that will confuse the hell out of them are the communities scattered all across the instances.
While I understand and largely agree with your point, I think it’s worthwhile to question whether it’s reasonable that this is the way people expect the Internet to work.
Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack, so that unless you’re somewhat tech-savvy, you can’t tell the concept of app apart from the concept of server. Not unlike how Android and iOS have been obscuring many basics of the system to the point that some people don’t even know what a filesystem is.
Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved, rather than just “the way things work” and that we need to cather to it. Mostly because FOSS services will always, invariably, struggle to adapt to a conception of the internet optimized for consumption and nothing else.
I agree that people nowadays might struggle to understand what, for instance, a third-party app is, but I also think it’s too an unreasonably low bar to just let it be, and have FOSS forever playing acrobatics to somehow adapt to it.
Whether Lemmy should be the one leading this struggle is a whole another argument lol. Somehow forcing people to understand this with Lemmy in particular, without changing anything of the larger culture, will just cause people to not use Lemmy outright.
But this cannot be the way it works. Everyone using the internet needs some bare minimum tech literacy.
Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack,
I fully agree here. Whatever software they have developed, is not rocket science, and mostly based off of existing standards.
Gmail, Outlook, etc… just a bunch of *DAV servers on top of an emailing service, paired with some SSO. Same goes for Reddit/X/FB. A simple DB just storing some info and doing some fancy sorting based on that info.
Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved
Yes!
But, on the other hand it’s a two-fold sword.
Corps are making money off of peoples lack of knowledge, and this has been the way of how “offering a service” is being done probably since human history… and yes, it pisses me off as well, especially when it comes to human health and nutrition, etc…
But…
Say, you hire contract workers, to build a house, bc. you don’t know how to do it yourself. Then you need to hire someone else to approve the quality of the work that’s been done, since again… you lack the knowledge. After you’ve moved in, something breaks, again… you hire someone to fix it.
Now, at what point do you start learning about all the components involved in a built house? electricity, plumbering, walls, etc… and most importantly, do you even care in learning so or not?
And some people, just don’t care. They simply don’t. Even if the concept of a topic is very easy to grasp, they simply lack the interest in knowing about how it works.
Say you hire a company to build a house. You don’t have the skills or the know-to, but at some point, you’ll have to deal with some inevitable aspects of building a house, if only to discuss them with the workers. Say they “force” you to deal with plumbing, for example by including it in the budget. Imagine if you not only don’t know how plumbing works, but also what plumbing is. Maybe you’ve never had to think about it before. What would you do? Would you go to another company that doesn’t force you to deal with it, perhaps by not even providing it in the first place?
Say for the sake of argument that this becomes a generalized problem, and companies use it as an excuse to no longer provide plumbing in new houses, as a cost-saving measure. Most people don’t seem to care. Over 10 years pass by, and people have gotten used to expect not having running water at home. “It sucks, but that’s the way it is I guess”.
Now, a community-driven initiative arises to build cheaper houses, complete with running water. Can you imagine most people refusing participating, because building a house with running water implies having to know that plumbing supplies water? That the mere thought of it is already too complicated, and that maybe having fresh water at home is only for people whose special interest is plumbing?
You need some elementary knowledge on things, if only to exist in the world. The Fediverse, and I mean this wholeheartedly, is not that complicated once you grasp the most basic concepts of the internet.
While I won’t deny outright that open-source devs most of the time don’t think about making their software accessible to the wider public, and that some aspects of decentralized social media still have to be ironed out (duplicated communities on Lemmy are a pet-peeve of mine); these issues are often heavily blown out of proportion. Besides people honestly not understanding some concepts, I think there is also some deliberate anti-intellectualism going on with this topic in particular. People who spend their afternoons troubleshooting Windows just so that their computer games run at 60 FPS suddenly don’t know what a website is when Mastodon is mentioned.
I’m pretty certain that this “Fediverse is too complicated” mantra would not have worked at all before 2010.
We could stop bullying .ml users for being .ml users. That’s the only “war” I have seen here.
For real. I’ve seen people being dicks from every instance. I see far more .world peeps going into a frenzy because their world view was slightly critiqued than crazy tankie takes. Not saying those don’t happen, and fuck tankies, but there’s definitely more whining “fuck .ml” memes I see. It’s just jingoistic bullshit. This is the Internet, nothing you do here really matters. Get the fuck over yourselves.
