Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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I’m going to be holding a teach-in about the fediverse. AFK I mean. Like the people I live with, and am in community with in meat space. They all want to ditch corpo social media, but aren’t sure how. I’ll hold a digital one too for my more extended community, but I want to start with the people I truly live with. I think word of mouth is a great way to onboard people as it allows for a dynamic level of handholding. This is essentially “grassroots” social media after all.
I don’t really want Reddit to join Lemmy en masse. I want the people that see the value of pre-2010 social media, and the “local” internet, to understand and have access to these tools and spaces. I think that will be best done through education, not advertising. Advertising the platform is exactly what all the platforms we want to ditch do, and we are actively trying to not be those platforms.
The sense of “needing” more users, to me at least, is a hold out of the “infinite growth”, capitalist, mindset. I don’t want infinite growth for my instance, I want the people it’s made for to find it, and enjoy communicating with the people they share it with.
We need more users for those small spaces to grow, one of the reasons I still use Reddit alongside Lemmy is that there is no 'South African' community on here, there is a very alive and fun South African community on reddit, that alone will make me keep using Reddit.
I'm sure that's true for many other niche communities, for those to take hold in Lemmy we need numbers.
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TBH, if you can't handle picking a server, please just stay away.
Yeah I feel like that low bar and the fact people have to be informed and conscientious to join is part of why the community here seems better at deeper conversations.
Also helps that we aren't worth corporate and propaganda bots yet. As soon as you get big that can start happening and the way some countries are going Lemmy could be banned for not having lobbyist money.
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That's the feature! Not a bug.
The new reddit design sucks and always has, other than dark mode.
I feel like most the old school redditors have long migrated, I've only ever heard good things about the new UI from relatively new users.
Lemmy is old reddit, if not OG internet ethos.
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Text-based forums are a niche. The vast majority of the population doesn't like that format. There's a reason no Bluesky has emerged, the appeal is just not there.
About Bluesky, there was an app that allowed "Reddit view" (so threads with votes). Can't find it back right now, the search mostly show Flashes, the Instagram alternative, which probably reflects the larger interest for that type of format.
The web ui has this option now. Although you can't collapse threads so it's still pretty hard to navigate
If anything the success or the Twitter ui shows you don't always need a good UX to succeed
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It's a solved problem. Check out phtn.app and vger.app also Alexandrite, Next and Tesseract. Like the problem is solved 5 times over.
Unless we use one of those as the default UI, the problem isn't solved, people will give up before knowing of their existence.
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Using Boost for Lemmy and it's almost like I never switched.
This 100%. And there are other former-reddit-3rd party apps as well afaik
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I think it's less about ux and more about being confused. People aren't faking being confused. I'm pretty tech savvy but had to do a double take. Still don't fully understand the nuances of federation after over a year and a half. I don't really need to understand all of it though.
What's there to understand? Does the average person understand that reddit consists of a frontend written in a frontend framework that compiles to HTML, CSS, and JS? Do they understand that HTTPS is used to make the request between the client and server on port 443? Do they know that the request is processed by a back end connecting to postgresql and redis or memcache for faster responses? That most assets are probably delivered by a CDN?
Probably not. And why should they? They don't need to understand how the fediverse works, nor do they have to understand how email works. All they need to do is select a server, create an account, and start interacting. Same as email.
There's no mystery. The fediverse isn't complicated unless you freak out and start realising that the entire internet is more complicated than the shiny, glossy thing on top of it - which doesn't need to be understood to have simple interactions with.
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This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s
Except everyone just uses gmail now
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Unless we use one of those as the default UI, the problem isn't solved, people will give up before knowing of their existence.
Tell it to the hosts.
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I specifically remember looking up tables of who defederates from who and what instances allow NSFW or downvoting because this was an issue among some of the top instances back then.
I ended up making 4 different accounts over 2 months until I landed on a server I'm happy with. That will never be acceptable to any normal user.
Every time someone brings up these issues, people here downplay them like you are doing it right now and nothing is ever done about it.
This, the survivor bias is absurdly high around lemmy.
This is my fourth instance because, for some reason, it's extremely hard to find an instance that defeds the 3 main propaganda instances, allows porn/hentai, piracy talk, weed and isn't too pissy about downvotes.Still I am thinking about leaving lemmy due to a complete lack of content for my country other than government propaganda... And I don't feel comfortable creating a community for the same reason and there doesn't seem to be anyone else from my country so... Nobody who cared about it (or who could help me mod).
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People these days look weird at you if don't use Gmail so you can't see their Google Calendar invite or some other thing that only works with Google... People are literally pushing tech monopolies.
@Octagon9561 @isaaclyman worse some big email sending services like sendgrid embedded in a lot solutions don't work with privacy enhanced e-mail services.
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Using Boost for Lemmy and it's almost like I never switched.
Same...though it seems to do some weird stuff like not marking DMs read, or not having an easy way to embed a photo that's already hosted somewhere (and my instance seems a bit conservative with size limits).
Still, it's a solid app, and the only way I interacted with reddit.
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Using Boost for Lemmy and it's almost like I never switched.
For the android users : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayayo.lemmy
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The UX for both Voyager and Sync seem really good. I've tried it out on a device, you can scroll before logging in, and when you try to create an account there aren't loops to jump through and a default instance is pre-selected
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I found a beautiful web client for Lemmy that I wish was the default experience. It would surely help Lemmy in gaining popularity.
here's the link: https://phtn.app/
Thanks for the tip Photon is great!
I use it with Alexandrite as well. Those alternative clients really made a difference in my experience on desktop.
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I found a beautiful web client for Lemmy that I wish was the default experience. It would surely help Lemmy in gaining popularity.
here's the link: https://phtn.app/
This I like, it solved many of the issues. I wish it was the default.
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The fediverse being "endless wars about who is federated" is not really true, is it?
Sure not everyone is federated with everyone else, but legacy social media is federated with nobody at all. Federation is the entire point of the Fediverse, you connect with people you want to connect with and you don't connect with people you don't. It's as simple as that.
Plus, do people really want to be on a single platform with everyone else in the world?
Because that's a big part of what broke the internet in the first place...99% of users are going to check out when you ask them what server to join.
I'm so sick of this dumb ass argument...
People who complain about "servers" need to tell me what they think "the internet" is. The existence of servers didn't stop online video games, email or discord/slack from catching on with hundreds of millions of people, so why is it suddenly a problem when it comes to the Fediverse?
Onboarding obviously needs to be better, but I'm going to be totally honest honest here: I don't think these are legitimate, actionable or useful critiques.
These are merely excuses from people who are addicted to legacy social media and who don't give a shit that the internet is owned and controlled by a few rich corporations.
Well ot kinda was true for the time of the big reddit exodus, there were very active and massively upvoted threads about one instance defederating from another, instances debating on whether they should defederate, beehive publicly wondering whether to ditch lemmy etc
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TBH, if you can't handle picking a server, please just stay away.
The reality is this filters out all non tech savvy people.
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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 to download the thunder app (it's very similar to many of the popular reddit apps) and just give them a list of the 10 most popular fediverse's to pick from to make an account.
I mentioned this like a year ago. Users will need their hands held to get them to easily come over.
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Haha that’s very true. Same concept as signing up for a specific email provider. Hadn’t really thought of that.
It's literally in the "Introduction" to lemmy (third paragraph):
