Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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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...
The idea that one must commit, is the problem. At first, I signed up for 3 or 4 servers. It needs to be pointed out that no commitment is necessary.
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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?
Uh yeah. I’ve got no clue how to find new communities? Instances? Groups? Whatever the hell the equivalent of a subreddit is called. It’s not user friendly at all.
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We don't want to send everyone to the same instance otherwise it'll end up becoming dominant (see Lemmy World)
From what I've learnt in network science, I've got bad news for you: real-world networks tend to follow power-law distributions.
Lemmy, being a social network, is unlikely to be an exception. Some instances are going to become hubs and the rest would be peripheral.
Sadly you're probably right. It would be nice if there were some load balancing mechanism where restrigrations could be shut for the larger instances where it recognises that it's grown much larger than the rest, and recommend altnerative instances.
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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.
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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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?
Ah, The Great Filter of Lemmy, yes.
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Just recommend a website for them to join.
But the crux is which one do you recommend? We don't want to send everyone to the same instance otherwise it'll end up becoming dominant (see Lemmy World).
Ideally we shouldn't need to go through this motion of trying to work out which instance to choose or recommend one for them, they should be able to do that themselves after getting their feet wet.
I think a good solution would be to randomly send people to one of the top 5 instances that aren't very political (What ever that might be)
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Explain what exactly?
If you have to explain a joke it loses its meaning.
If you have to explain UI, it loses its meaning.It should be self explanatory.
People here say Lemmy's UX is fine, and then give a paragraph of instructions a user should follow to get started.
They should just be able to start scrolling immediately, and if they want to interact they should be asked to create an account, and a instance suggested. -
The idea that one must commit, is the problem. At first, I signed up for 3 or 4 servers. It needs to be pointed out that no commitment is necessary.
So now you are telling a user to make 3 or 4 accounts at once
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OK but that's still no explanation. I want to understand the problem deeper than "it's bad".
I'm sure you've seen some of the bad experiences new users have posted on here.
But I'll summarise
- It's intimidating to pick a instance,
- Once you login the UI is very different to what you're used to and not very intuitive.
- No tutorial
etc.
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By read-only, I mean they couldn't create any communities. So essentially it would be an instance that has accounts but nothing else. Users would still be able to vote and comment on other commnities and subscribe. They could stay on it if they wanted to, but of course they wouldn't be able to create any communities.
That doesn't help at all, I'd say. Most people won't ever create communities.
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The apps are kinda meh. I haven't found one that doesn't come with significant disadvantages yet, and I've tried FIVE.
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There's no recommendations feed. You see what you're subscribed to, or everything. No in-between. You can't see what you've subscribed to, and a few posts that the algorithm thinks you might like. People like to complain about the algorithm, but one reason it's so addictive is that it's useful.
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Notifications don't work in every app
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Just having a feed that behaves normally seems to be really hard to do for apps. Stop slowing me posts I've already scrolled past, and when I click home/pull down to refresh, I want new posts, not the same thing again that I've already scrolled past and ignored. Some apps have settings (that are somehow not on by default) to hide read posts and mark posts read on scroll, but I haven't tried an app where that works every time.
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There's no "main" app. Think about Reddit before the API fees. There used to be a default app. It had its issues, but most features worked out of the box, and most things were intuitive and normie-friendly. You could use that to get comfortable with the social network itself, and then eventually try other apps when something got too annoying.
Compare that with Lemmy. You want to try it, and you already have to deal with choice paralysis. A ton of apps on the website, with utterly unhelpful descriptions ("an open-source Lemmy client developed by so-and-so"; wow, exactly zero of those words help me pick) and a random order that doesn't even let me default to one most popular one.
Quite a few apps focus on niche UI features like swipe-based navigation while still not having the basics down right. I'm several months into having joined Lemmy and I still haven't found an app that feels somewhat right. That is a challenge not one of the other social networks has managed. Congrats, Lemmy. Impressive.
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Picking a server and signing up in general is complicated. And it's an impactful decision that you have NO tools to make so early, unless you start researching like it's school homework.
.world? That's popular but you'll be judged for having joined it, plus you lose access to the piracy community. .ml? Hope you like communists and DRAMA. And if you get it wrong, there's no intuitive and easy way to migrate. You clunkily export your settings and re-import them; the servers will NOT talk to each other. And even then you lose some stuff.
This UX issue is tough. I don't have an easy solution. But I'm sure a UX expert could find one.
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Manual validation of your sign-up by a human. What is this, a Facebook group? If you introduce a 24-hour delay so early in the process, of course people are going to fall off.
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The mouse logo is kinda ugly, won't lie. I'm sure it's a more potent people repellent than you think.
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There is a LOT of tribalism. On Reddit, there's r/Canada, that's full of convinced conservatives that won't hesitate to artificially skew the discourse. And there's r/OnGuardForThee, basically the same but with progressives angry at the conservatives.
On Lemmy, that feels like the rule, not the exception. I just joined communities based on my interests, and my feed is full of communist vs communist vs non-communist drama. Can we frickin' chill?
If I need to start filtering out whole fields of interest that were taken over, joining less popular community clones or literally defederating instances to get a good experience, we've got it wrong. Normal people don't wanna do that when they literally just got here. They'll just leave.
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Somehow even more US-centric than Reddit. So... Much... American politics.
I wish just like NSFW filter, posts can be marked as Political, and users have the option to block all of that.
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If you have to explain a joke it loses its meaning.
If you have to explain UI, it loses its meaning.It should be self explanatory.
People here say Lemmy's UX is fine, and then give a paragraph of instructions a user should follow to get started.
They should just be able to start scrolling immediately, and if they want to interact they should be asked to create an account, and a instance suggested.Sorry, but that's not really an answer: Explain what you are referring to exactly please?
They can start scrolling immediately on every instance that I've seen.
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this is about 0.1% of posts… quit lying
You can either face reality or not, literally nobody cares about your opinion on the matter. Many people who don't join lemmy say this, that is simple fact.
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How old are you, out of interest? Your posts in your similar thread about default viewing experience makes it seem like you want an Instagram-style image browser rather than the link aggregator which Reddit and Lemmy actually are.
I'm 32 and work in tech, The reality is the vast majority of people won't want to use old.reddit style UI
I'm comfortable powering through shitty UI/UX etc. I've even built them myself, but others won't settle for shitty UI
You and your friends are old I assume, and got used to the old.reddit UI, and didn't want to change.
Most people are used to modern UI, and won't want to change to old UI, just like you don't want to change either. We should better cater for average people.
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I think a good solution would be to randomly send people to one of the top 5 instances that aren't very political (What ever that might be)
According to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy, the top 5 (where top 5 is defined by user count) are:
- lemmy.world
- lemm.ee
- sh.itjust.works
- hexbear
- lemmy.dbzer0
After there's:
- beehaw
- lemmygrad
- programming.dev
- lemmy.ca
Lemmy.world is pretty safe and generic, but it's already huge (173k users vs 33k of lemm.ee).
Lemm.ee is also a safe bet.
Hexbear is totally out of question
dbzer0 is great, but it leans heavily in a political direction -
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?
Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
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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?
The people who aren’t here are making excuses to not be here. Otherwise they’d be here.
That being said the feud between world and ml users is pretty noticeable
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Do we? I was never asked.
The community as it is right now, feels like the early days of Reddit and Slashdot. I really don't mind that slight speed bump.
To my knowledge we don't want to filter out non tech savvy people. If that's what we want then cool, leave it as is.
But I don't think that's true, especially not for all instances.
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By read-only, I mean they couldn't create any communities. So essentially it would be an instance that has accounts but nothing else. Users would still be able to vote and comment on other commnities and subscribe. They could stay on it if they wanted to, but of course they wouldn't be able to create any communities.
Like the other person said, 99% of users never create communities anyway. I don't really know what this read-only instance is meant to solve.
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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...
The reddit concept of subreddits also doesn't work well with federation IMO (at least no Lemmy's implementation).
Want to talk about video games? Well, there's no /r/games, instead there are bunch of different /c/games on different servers with varying amounts of activity. You basically gotta make the "pick a server" decision again whenever you post something. If you make the wrong choice, your post might not get seen by anyone, and even if you post to the biggest sub, you'll be missing out on eyeballs from people on other servers who aren't subscribed to that instance for whatever reason.
For example, lemmy.ml/c/linux_gaming and lemmy.world/c/linux_gaming have around the same number of subscribers. Should I post to both? Maybe the same people subscribe to both, so that's pointless? Or maybe I'll miss out on a lot of discussion if I post only to one? There's no way for me to know.
For me, it makes Lemmy less useful than reddit for asking really niche questions and getting useful answers. For posting comments on whatever pops up in my feed though, it works great.
I don't have any good solutions to this, and I'm sure it has been considered already. When I first joined, I remembered seeing people bring this same issue up, but it doesn't seem like it went anywhere? (Or maybe it did?)
