Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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I have friends who still only use old.reddit and refuse to switch to new UI.
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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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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 switched to Mbin but Lemmy has a variety of interfaces, not so sure this is necessarily a UX issue but an understanding issue.
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I respectfully disagree. Reddit went downhill and significantly more difficult to manage/moderate when the masses joined.
If people aren't willing to invest a bit of time to understand how Lemmy works (and it's really not that difficult to understand), then I don't think Lemmy is a good fit for them.
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The UI is fine, you can use Photon or other modern UI's
The UX is the problem (User Experience), the defaults just suck and many will give up before even knowing better UI's exist, or finding the right settings to make the default UI work for them.
Just picking a instance is intimidating and many will give up before that, we should guide them to pick an instance or choose a default and give them the option to change.
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We should do both.
Give people a good UX, and build solid communities.
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I think people who claim that the UI/UX is fine are missing the point. It is fine to you, but it is not fine to whomever made the claim. And for every person that makes such claim, there are hundreds/thousands who think/feel the same but don't say anything.
Lemmy, as a community and as a project, should seriously listen more to the opinion of newcomers.
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Unlike twitter, if there are UI issues, people have a lot of options to try different clients, both mobile and web. I don't use one only, I flip between a bunch of them, both on web and mobile. Sometimes the vanilla Lemmy experience is what you want, other times someone might have made a great ui for browsing one specific community that you subscribe to.
I'm also somewhere against the argument of it being difficult to pick a server, too difficult to know if it's the right one for me, etc etc. In other parts of life, people make decisions on this all the time, day in day out, without batting an eyelid, and even on issues with a bigger impact on them, than which federated instans they sign up to a service on. Mobile phone subscriptions, which email provider you should use, what internet provider you should sign up with.
For some reason, social media seems to be one of these areas where we think it's totally fine that monopolies exist, and options are not... an option. We need to resocialise the idea that it doesn't hurt to make a conscious choice about where you lay your identity online, and what you sink your time and attention into.
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we should guide them to pick an instance or choose a default and give them the option to change.
Isn't that what most people are doing nowadays?
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I'm not suggesting its impossible to improve the UX but I a) I think thats going to be an incredibly low priority for the developers and b) I'm not sure what changes can be made to address the essential conflict between the whole point of the fediverse - decentralisation - and a sign up process that essentially hides that without taking away an informed choice.
In reality, its not really that much of a difficult concept to grasp and there are loads of resources like fedi.tips etc to help people. If the communities and content was of a sufficient quality (as oppose to quantity) people would make the fairly minimal effort to understand why the fediverse is the way it is.
And if people don't or won't thats really their call.
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Yes, and if you join a German-speaking instance as a non-German speaking user, the experience will also be subpar. Hence I talked about content, not language.
