Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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@[email protected] commented above with a good experience of why it's a crappy idea (I was thinking a randomzier would be good too.
I just clicked the first option it showed, which (for me) was a non-English instance. The second option was that LGBT-focused instance that defederated with lemmy.world a few months ago. Of course I didn’t know anything about either community so I just picked randomly.
I could see that happening a lot. I've messed with other randomizing systems and sometimes you forget how many niche or non matching picks can pop up when you really look at it. Even a 10% match with language barriers wouldn't be good for a reliable system of placement.
I also don't like the "what harry potter house" do you belong to quiz stuff or anything that asks to crawl or input your data (no thank you). Definitely more complicated than I thought.
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I disagree that this is a concern. If you are already exaggerating about federation wars, chances are you already tried lemmy and know a good bit about selecting instances. The average user will not care as much as you do.
The average user will go to join-lemmy site, will not care at all about the different instances and likely choose the biggest one or first one they see. None of them will think "oh no this one is involved in federation wars" because thats not something you find out before knowing some about the fediverse.
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The biggest advantage of federated social media is that there's multiple servers. I know it can be a rough point for new users, but most people can just join whatever the largest server is and they'll be perfectly fine. You need to pick a server because lemmy isn't one website, and it shouldn't be one website. People should be able to host an instance if they disagree with another one's moderation/rules, and spreading the load across many servers helps to prevent large scale downtime when servers go down.
All of these advantages can coexist with new users just being pointed to lemmy.world. -
whatever, just make a lemmy app that defaults to lemmy.world i guess
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The average user will go to join Lemmy and abort, because they can't grasp the idea that joining one server gets them into other servers. They worry about server selection, have analysis paralysis, and nope out. That's why they're asking for a bluesky reddit and not a mastodon reddit.
Normie's want centralization because they don't understand how else it can work and while some can learn and have it explained many will give up before giving it a chance.
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Bad UX isn't keeping most people away from Lemmy. Not being able to give up their addiction to Reddit is what's keeping them from Lemmy. There's a lot of people who will complain about the shitty things billionaires and tech companies and politicians do to them, but aren't willing to lift a finger to change things.
You're never going to bring those people to Lemmy unless Reddit shuts down and you develop an algorithm to spoon feed them whatever they want to feed their doomscrolling habit. Lemmy is better off without them.
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The average user that will get to join-lemmy will GTFO.
The average user gets their Google account by opening their device and going step by step with nice animations.
Find a person that already has an apartment, bills, work, relationship and isn't working in tech.
A. Ask him to join lemmy. Ask after a month if it happened (spoiler, it didn't).
B. Help him open an account, check after he month if he kept it. -
The average user that will get to join-lemmy will GTFO.
The average user gets their Google account by opening their device and going step by step with nice animations.
Find a person that already has an apartment, bills, work, relationship and isn't working in tech.
A. Ask him to join lemmy. Ask after a month if it happened (spoiler, it didn't).
B. Help him open an account, check after he month if he kept it. -
Somehow most people figured out email. It's like picking Gmail, Outlook, Proton, Mailbox, Yahoo. Doesn't matter, pick the one you like, ceate as many accounts as you want, or make your own.
This isn't a Fediverse or Lemmy problem, but is speaks volumes of how broken the Internet has become and how far we've fallen.
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Do what rich people do and set up shell companies. There are law firms that specialize in this kind of thing.
But if that is a hard requirement is a Lemmy instance the right tool for the job? Wouldn't something on Tor be better?
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Bad choice, many new users specifically came here because of [email protected], which can't be accessed from lemmy.world.
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The average user, me, will go to sign up, kinda briefly go to Wikipedia on fediverse, still not understand, and pick a random server, and then here I am trying to figure it out as I go
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i would guess the piracy audience doesn't struggle with the same problems that would make a default instance useful
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That's about how it worked for me when I first tried giving it a go about a year ago. Wasn't until today when I saw that Reddit post talking about paywalling some subs that I decided to give it another go.
In fact that post had a pretty decent write up of how to set up Lemmy and what it was. Probably the only reason I managed to kinda figure it out.
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I frequently see comments saying stuff like “don’t trust them, they’re from Lemmy.ml” or “I’m glad Hexbear defederated” usually in terms of tankies/pro-russia anti-Ukraine support. Or occasionally, a random dislike of Lemmy.world because it’s too much like Reddit (isn’t that the point?)
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Oh, yeah, I can see why uniform randomness would be a problem. I thought the criticism was directed at "Just sort people into a Lemmy server either based off their interests or location"
I was thinking that you do a little questionnaire and it gives you the best matching server.
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Even worse, the Tankies are basically running the landing page that asks them which instance to join.
We should probably make a non-tankie version and get it trending for the Algorithm.
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While humanity can be incredible and beautiful to look at from a distance...
Humans, tend to fucking suck. -
The problem is content, there isn't any. Either I select all -> hot and see new content that almost feels like /r/subreddit_name/new or I select all -> active and while those have engagement, its all very old content, like a day old, two days old, etc. And then the other problem is that I only see two types of content usually: Either articles or screenshots from social media. Nothing else.
I just think that unless there's a sudden influx of users for whatever reason, lemmy will never pick up. We just need more and more people, but have no way of getting them, not to mention so many communities just choosing not to migrate off Reddit, especially huge sports communities.
