Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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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’m fine with the effort bar being selecting an instance. If someone can’t get beyond that, there’s probably not much they have to say I’d be interested in.
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It's worse than reddit. It's more liberal.
Oh, cool, a new account to block.
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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?
That bar to entry is a good thing; it helps keep most of the stupid out. The same stupid that ruined the rest of the internet.
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I use Stealth with the express intent of not contributing to Reddit (there are no ads on Stealth) while consuming their server's resources. It's a sort of protest in its own way. Especially since those niche interest subs are the only way I could quickly get information about the community without having to scroll through discord servers— hell, in Lemmy-Kbin most of them are run by bots reposting from Reddit, and there is no way I can manage or advertise my own magazine, what with my busy schedule in my university.
You could also use revanced and patch the reddit apk on android.
No adds etc.
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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?
99% of users are going to check out when you ask which server they want to join
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When reddit was coming up, a big issue people had was it was too confusing with bad UI. People didn't know which subreddits to follow. Its very similar, theres just a whole other layer.
Just find a popular instance that is federated with similar instances. And making accounts are easy too, so just do it in two or three instances. Yeah it's a bit much compared to reddit, but it's very very easy.
In their defense, the reddit UI did suck and the webpage was barely functional for a very, very long time. How many years did it take them to get video to be even passably functional?
Almost every Lemmy interface is an order of magnitude better than anything reddit has ever managed to produce. Voyager is a pleasure imo.
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I’m fine with the effort bar being selecting an instance. If someone can’t get beyond that, there’s probably not much they have to say I’d be interested in.
Likewise, lol. A little friction keeps the chaff out.
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Maybe it's more like picking a football team
It's closer to that yes, and you don't really know whar a football team is
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i came here to say the same thing! if people actually genuinely like the new reddit ui, those people might just want and need different things out of a website than we do, and trying to onboard them might be a fool's errand. not to be a gatekeeper, i'd love if everyone quit the corporate web, but a lot of the things people complain about here like the ui and the decentrilization are why i'm here (in my case mbin) and not there to begin with
same thing with mastodon, people still rail against it's ui but the ui was a big reason i even made a mastodon long before twitter was bought out, back when they first tried to phase out the chronological timeline
Yeah like. I want a large community and stuff but. The idea of a new Reddit preferring community is weirdly repellent.
I really don’t want to hate on their preferences but also holy shit.
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"Here's Lemmy. It's like Reddit. There's a bunch of different websites for it, but they all have basically the same things on them. Just join one near you, if you don't like it you can always use a different one later"
That would help if they had a clue which one was near them.
Default to "nearest" one?
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Thats funny, Im also 32 and completely happy with the default Lemmy UI. Definitely wouldnt use something like new Reddit. But the good thing is that there are so many different choices, and its possible to create instances with a different default UI.
We could do AB testing and see what users prefer.
Or at least change the Default Ui to adhere to good UX design principles
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A/B testing is not really possible in a decentralized system like this, it would require all instance admins to collaborate for collecting results, and would make deployment much more complicated. Not to forget that there simply arent enough development resources to implement it. That said if you see anything that can be improved, you're welcome to make a pull request. Its standard Typescript wit TailwindCSS and Inferno, nothing complicated.
You don't have to AB test all instances, we can do smaller tests.
But yea that's complicated and takes effort, instead we should at least follow good UX design principles for the default UX
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So my understanding from reading this (and other threads on Lemmy) is that:
-A majority of Lemmy users would rather the userbase remained small (in comparison to corporate social media and even compared to Mastodon).
-And a small but vocal minority wants to grow Lemmy to the point of being at least one of the choices, if not the de facto preferred alternative, on the mind of most Redditors who are sick of Reddit.
Is that accurate?
edit: formatting
The majority wants better UX (look at up vote ratio of comments)
A fair amount of users want to gatekeep lemmy to only tech savvy people.
BeCaUsE fUcK dUmB NoRmIeS WhO CaNt FiGuRe It OuT, iTs JuSt LiKe EmAiL
There's a lot of us who just want better on boarding and defaults, it's not a lot to ask.
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because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
No, it isn't.
The UX is fine. It's clean, fast, and functional. Anyone who is too fancy for "old Reddit" can stay on new Reddit with the bots and Xers. They'd just come over and be nothing but insufferable anyway.
o.oMultiple front ends and themes are available. In the end, we're here for the conversation, not fancy graphics, sounds, or CSS trash.
If someone can't get past picking a server or simple graphics, the likelyhood of them being any benefit here is minimal. The more is not always the merrier.
The UX is objectively bad, it breaks most good design principles
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That bar to entry is a good thing; it helps keep most of the stupid out. The same stupid that ruined the rest of the internet.
It doesn't keep dumb people out, it keeps non tech savvy people out, I've seen extremely immature people on here
I'd pick a mature user over a tech savvy user any day.
Ideally they'd be both -
It doesn't keep dumb people out, it keeps non tech savvy people out, I've seen extremely immature people on here
I'd pick a mature user over a tech savvy user any day.
Ideally they'd be bothit keeps non tech savvy people out,
Picking a server isn't a tech savvy person thing to do and it's a good idea to stop pretending like it is. My wife, who needs me to move her steam games to other drives for her, managed to do it without asking me a thing. Tech skill has nothing to do with it
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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?
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?
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Why not keep your account to talk about Lemmy?
I don't think reddit admin will lift the suspension. So I can't post or comment. No point.
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New users get overwhelmed with decision fatigue, especially when they have average intelligence.
When selecting a federation, new users should be told:
"Because Lemmy isn't run by a large corporation, lots of small volunteers run Lemmy and run different copies of Lemmy at the same time. These different copies are called instances. You can choose 1 or just click the large red button and we'll randomly select one of the most popular instances for you. If you aren't sure what to choose, just press the button!"
Sorry, that's more than one sentence.
person you're saying that to: "So much words, very explaining!" runs away
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99% of users are going to check out when you ask which server they want to join
Although, I think the answer to the barrier to entry is to be less concerned with making federated services feel like centralized apps, more concerned with rebranding server select as the advantage that it actually is. Educate those people.
