Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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It’s why my less “tech savvy” friends won’t join. They don’t understand what federation is, and No they don’t want to take 2 minutes to learn.
It’s annoying, but it’s reality. People don’t understand the whole different servers thing, federation, and how to pick one.
I realize marketing isn’t a strong suit (nor should it be), but I’m proposing two solutions (well maybe not solutions, but something to help):
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A quick animated video showing the benefits of Lemmy and how this all works (if it hasn’t already been done yet)
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A service that basically simplifies and centralizes the signup process to one screen. During server selection, users can see the most populated servers and click on them to learn the specific rules for the server, etc.
Idk, maybe we already have all this…or this is just complicating the issue. Or maybe we only want people willing to take 2 minutes to learn about how it all works. Tbh that’s a pretty good natural filter for the types of users I want to be interacting and discussing with.
They don’t understand what federation is
They can't use email..?
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Nothing, this seems like a good thing, I don't want them here if they literally cannot even comprehend the concept of different servers, though somehow no one has this issue with discord even though it's dogshit, almost as if they just yearn for the corporate boot.
Or even just accepting a default, or a randomly assigned one.
There was something in retail I learned. There are people who will come in on sale days, and they will demand perfect customer service, and demand the lowest prices, and ask for more sales and bring coupons, all while talking about how they spend so much money there and that they're so loyal. Then they'll leave and you'll never see them again
You can spend time and effort with them, the ones who only care about the cheapest place, or you can spend time with the customers who are actually there regularly. The ones who get to know your names, who are loyal, or enjoy a sale sure but also will be there even when there isn't one.
I don't want to attract users simply because reddit bad, and cater our experience for people who can't bother to learn just the basic tenant of the fediverse. I want to cater our experiences for those who are here daily, and the ones who are genuinely interested. It's the longer slower approach, but we'll stay more true to our goals
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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?
Using Boost for Lemmy and it's almost like I never switched.
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Or even just accepting a default, or a randomly assigned one.
There was something in retail I learned. There are people who will come in on sale days, and they will demand perfect customer service, and demand the lowest prices, and ask for more sales and bring coupons, all while talking about how they spend so much money there and that they're so loyal. Then they'll leave and you'll never see them again
You can spend time and effort with them, the ones who only care about the cheapest place, or you can spend time with the customers who are actually there regularly. The ones who get to know your names, who are loyal, or enjoy a sale sure but also will be there even when there isn't one.
I don't want to attract users simply because reddit bad, and cater our experience for people who can't bother to learn just the basic tenant of the fediverse. I want to cater our experiences for those who are here daily, and the ones who are genuinely interested. It's the longer slower approach, but we'll stay more true to our goals
Nice comparison
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They don’t understand what federation is
They can't use email..?
Haha that’s very true. Same concept as signing up for a specific email provider. Hadn’t really thought of that.
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I was on Sync for Reddit before going here, and checked out Lemmy as the devs switched platform. So the joke's on them, my UX is basically identical.
That said, sucks that people shy away because of complexity.
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Using Boost for Lemmy and it's almost like I never switched.
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The core issue is none of my hobbies exist on Lemmy. I tried really hard to populate those instances but there were just 3 (three) people engaging in discussions. What even is the point?
Which communities were those?
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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
That was Aol.
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I dont know what you are talking about. What subscriptions am i adding to where?
The communities you are subscribed too, which show up in your Subscribed feed.
Those can be imported into Piefed, maybe the transition easier.
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Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media (which Reddit is). Without attracting new users Lemmy will almost certainly perish. It's goal should be a low bar to onboard new social media users coming from places like Reddit, Facebook, X.
Saying "Not our problem" is a woefully shortsighted.
Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media
Lemmy is a protocol for networking individual privately hosted social media instances. It is not a panacea for corporate control of social media infrastructure. You're still hosting these sites on AWS / Azure / some other large corporately controlled private hardware setup. You're still securing the URL from a private DNS. You're still paying for these sites out of the surplus of a handful of wealth(ier) patrons and their friendly donors (or ending up like Hexbear.net, with a domain name up for grabs because it was mismanaged by part time broke amateurs).
Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.
There's not a lot we can do about it individually. I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP's image's "this is too weird and scary" attitude.
If popping into the Fediverse and just picking a Lemmy instance was as straightforward as selecting "Communities I'm interested in" on other bigger social media feeds, the onboarding would be smoother. But if you poke around and see people going whole hog frothing at the mouth "Everyone on <instance>.<whatever> is morally degenerate and has ruined the community at large!!!" reactionary in between instances, that's an immediate turn off that I don't think anyone within the Lemmy network knows how to deal with.
Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit, just ported into a more decentralized network. And it neglects the fundamentals of modern web hosting (we're all at the mercy of the IANA / Cloudflare, etc / the major hosting companies).
Lemmy is, itself, a shortsighted patch on a much larger and scarier problem. The instance infighting only reveals how shortsighted.
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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 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/
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You can literally block instances as a user on Lemmy and have been able to do so good quite some time. No need to run your own instance.
I stand corrected. However:
Neither Jerboa, the first app on join-lemmy.org and the one by the Lemmy devs, nor Lemmy.World's own web interface gave me this option. I downloaded Thunder, Voyager, and Sync, and only Thunder gave me that as an option. When searching how to block instances, the top results are that you can't (at least on DDG).
So, unless I'm being incredibly stupid right now, I can block instances, but only if I use a specific app, or perhaps choose the "right" instance. That's still very bad UX.
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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.
Cool for you to do a presentation. Feel free to share how it went here afterwards!
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it feels like old reddit
As someone who exclusively used old.reddit.com, this isn't actually a bad thing.
Also apps for the mobile experience, and I want to say alexandrite for the desktop experience?
Yeah if it looked like new reddit I wouldn't be here. That site is ass. IDK how anyone can stand to use it.
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The communities you are subscribed too, which show up in your Subscribed feed.
Those can be imported into Piefed, maybe the transition easier.
The transition to what? Why am i using piefed?
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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
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.
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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?
TBH, if you can't handle picking a server, please just stay away.
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Wait wait wait... This implies people like new reddit... That shit makes my eyes bleed wtf
Well I do like new Reddit. It has a dark mode and works well with different screen/window sizes. Sadly it's slow and equires JS to load the content (makes it slow).
Imo Lemmy web is most of the good parts of old Reddit and some of good parts of new Reddit. Though it's not the best UI. My favorite UI for Reddit is Redlib [1]. It's fast, works well on desktop and mobile, and looks great imo.
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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 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.
