Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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I disagree. I'm an ex tech guy, and I found it to be a pain in the ass. I really appreciate everything that everyone here does, but it's empty enough that I recognize a number of users. The average person isn't signing up. At 50k active users, our voice is small.
I don't know what the grand vision is, but if it's to provide the people with a corporate free perform, there needs to be... The People.
Yes exactly!!
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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.
But in an MMO, you still get the same content no matter what server you choose. Over here, it directly impacts what content you can interact with based on (de)federation.
If you joined a German-speaking WoW server as a non-speaking German, the experience was going to be subpar
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I think the irony here is that the user-friendliness experience of Bluesky stems from it being a centralized service (in practice). I seriously doubt most people who signed up for Bluesky even understand what "decentralized social media" means.
I'm not saying Lemmy (and the greater Fediverse) can't improve, but it's clear that the biggest barrier for most people is the decentralized aspect itself -- the core of the Fediverse -- which is something one shouldn't really "hide".
As long as the state of social media usership demands centralized practices, then the Fediverse will forever be at a disadvantage in gaining mass adoption.
We have a slight disadvantage in that regard yes, but I know we can get to a UX comparable to Bluesky and Reddit.
There just doesn't seem to be much focus on it, I feel setting good defaults will solve most of these issues.
Lemmy is nice for me now, but it took a lot of effort finding the settings and UI that I like, people will give up long before that.
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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?
OP, FYI I pinged you on this post but it was probably drown in the replies to your posts: https://lemm.ee/post/55244676
If you want to try out your approach (Photon as default, probably some communities hidden from the All feed), feel free to create a community dedicated to that project. You can probably promote it here and on a few other communities. The biggest challenge is probably going to find an admin wanting to give this a try.
I wanted to do something similar a months ago ( https://lemm.ee/post/52588852 ), but no admin was interested. Maybe you'll have more luck.
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That's how you create a bubble of only tech savvy people.
This seems to be quite a problem here, too many techy people and too few people with other interests, sure I'm in the first group myself but even then this is still a problem
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OP, FYI I pinged you on this post but it was probably drown in the replies to your posts: https://lemm.ee/post/55244676
If you want to try out your approach (Photon as default, probably some communities hidden from the All feed), feel free to create a community dedicated to that project. You can probably promote it here and on a few other communities. The biggest challenge is probably going to find an admin wanting to give this a try.
I wanted to do something similar a months ago ( https://lemm.ee/post/52588852 ), but no admin was interested. Maybe you'll have more luck.
Thank you I appreciate all the input, I won't have the time or energy to drive something like that.
I can get behind a cause like that and help push it, but won't be able to lead.I'd love a place where there is no politics, it might also be appealing to many and I think it should be the default.
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Thank you I appreciate all the input, I won't have the time or energy to drive something like that.
I can get behind a cause like that and help push it, but won't be able to lead.I'd love a place where there is no politics, it might also be appealing to many and I think it should be the default.
Then you probably hit the main issue. Everyone's time is limited.
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This seems to be quite a problem here, too many techy people and too few people with other interests, sure I'm in the first group myself but even then this is still a problem
[email protected] to discover communities!
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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?
Tell them that if you join any Lemmy instance (e.g. Marxist-Leninist instance of Lemmy (not Hexbear)) and if you ignore some stuff on the instance, then it's a pretty compelling experience.
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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 insinstancethout explicitly subbing to them all.
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.
The only real federation dramas I can think of were relating to Hexbear and Beehaw. If Greenleaf was on one of those instances then maybe it could explain their skewed perspective. Otherwise yeah, I don't get it.
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This seems to be quite a problem here, too many techy people and too few people with other interests, sure I'm in the first group myself but even then this is still a problem
Valid point
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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?
For me, a major issue isn't even the UI. It's federation control. On Mastodon & co, I can mute entire instances, cutting out A LOT of bullshit. On Lemmy, if I want that kind of control, I need to run my own instance. Doable, but kinda overkill.
It's one thing to hide individual subreddits on a centralised platform. It's another thing entirely to have many sites building a big platform, with the same communities duplicated with different rules and followings. That's just a game of wack-a-mole at that point.
And if I don't like the instance's communities, chances are I don't want to interact with its users either, leading to even more wack-a-mole.
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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?
I don't know, feddit.nl is pretty chill. I always see everything and barely anything objectable
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For me, a major issue isn't even the UI. It's federation control. On Mastodon & co, I can mute entire instances, cutting out A LOT of bullshit. On Lemmy, if I want that kind of control, I need to run my own instance. Doable, but kinda overkill.
It's one thing to hide individual subreddits on a centralised platform. It's another thing entirely to have many sites building a big platform, with the same communities duplicated with different rules and followings. That's just a game of wack-a-mole at that point.
And if I don't like the instance's communities, chances are I don't want to interact with its users either, leading to even more wack-a-mole.
https://piefed.social/ has user-level instance muting similar to Mastodon
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The vast majority of users don't like the old.reddit view, else reddit would have that as default.
I have friends who still only use old.reddit and refuse to switch to new UI.
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The vast majority of users don't like the old.reddit view, else reddit would have that as default.
It was the default for a very long time. Reddit changed that because it prevented them from monetizing the site that easily. And the admins seemed to dislike what RES could do with the old Reddit look.
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I have friends who still only use old.reddit and refuse to switch to new UI.
Would they be interested in Lemmy? Them using old.reddit shows that they would probably like it here
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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?
The UI isn't the problem? The attached screenshot shows people talking about federation. Federation is very confusing, but also the core part of how the Fediverse functions. The only thing you could to is to provide an entry portal, where all servers are categorized by the type of content they provide and you can check and uncheck the type of content you want or might want to interact with. Based on your choices, the portal could recommend a random Lemmy or Mbin instance that has a track record of being reliable and allows you to interact with most content of that type. So if you'd want to see porn for example, the portal should choose an instance that is federated with lemmynsfw.
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I have friends who still only use old.reddit and refuse to switch to new UI.
How old are those friends of yours?
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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?
I switched to Mbin but Lemmy has a variety of interfaces, not so sure this is necessarily a UX issue but an understanding issue.
