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?
The one thing that I like about the fediverse is that it somehow unintentionally has a filter to keep the low effort people from poisoning the well.
I have been on the fediverse from 2019 and these types of arguments have been floated times and again at each exodus wave. they expect to be offered everything on a silver platter. they come into a new platform maintained by hobbyists and good will people and they expect it to offer the same features, experiences and user base or even better than the once on proprietary media that spend billions of dollars to acquire that user base. they get screwed by one company and hope that another for profit won't do the same. Lemmy is even easier than email, as you don't need to know the handle of people of communities you interact with you just search for them or explore the public feed. We don't need them here.
there are many aspects the fediverse can improve upon. decentralization or federation isn't one of them
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You tell that to a normal user (and I mean NORMAL) and they will lose any interests in making the effort of attempting to pick a server... I know it sounds far fetched, but that's my experience with normal users, unless they have someone willing to hold their hand at every moment and every change, all these things scare them, no matter how simple they seem for us.
As someone who has had to explain to longtime Linux users why and how some arcane aspect of package management isn't grok-able by the common user, I understand where you're coming from with that point.
I do think the overall experience could be more intuitive and easier, but if the first concepts of federation and picking a server is too much for someone, I don't think that is possible to overcome since that's fundamental to this whole citizen controlled media experiment.
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I suggested it to a few ppl and even offered to show them how to use it but they said it's "too hard to understand" sad times we live in.
If they find Lemmy "too hard to understand", do we really want them here?
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And on manual validation for sign-ups
permissions/roles could improve this a lot https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3375#issuecomment-2657753039
Give thumbs up reactions on Github so the devs know what to prioritize
Not a bad idea!
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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?
IMO if Lemmy had all the features that old.reddt had it would still be an objectivly worse UX experience. Federating reduces UX, that's just a rule.
We should focus on making the onboarding process as simple as possible like enabling social login (inb4 insecure and not private: let people make their choices), and making it easier to move between instances and understand what instance you're looking at.
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Well, it's not because something has the potential to be addictive that it's necessarily bad. After all, a video game that isn't addictive at all could also be called boring.
I think the line between an enjoyable experience and unhealthy addictive features is drawn in user choice and the absence of malicious intent.
That's a fair point, actually. I suppose as long as an algorithm doesn't prioritize engagement at all costs, it could be a worthy addition.
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"but it feels like old reddit". My god, imagine actively preferring the new reddit UI. Let them keep their shiny jangling keys instead of coming over here and pestering the devs for a snoovatar feature or whatever nonsense.
The 'maybe read for 2 minutes to figure it out' miniscule barrier to entry is a feature not a bug.
Two minutes (and you're being very optimistic here, for someone who isn't technically inclined it's almost certainly going to be more) of required reading on a subject that's just not even remotely interesting to 99% of people eliminates basically all non technical people. Because they just don't care enough to devote that time. If that's the user base you want, that works out, but I'd like people here who can hold a conversation about something other than Linux and Star Trek. It's honestly kinda boring here.
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Would I be decreasing people's operating costs if I just opened an account on example.lol so most of my interaction was on my home instance?
Likely no. If one person on the instance is subscribed to a remote community, everything is synchronized anyways. If no one is subscribed to the remote community then it's probably a very small and low activity community anyways, which means it's a drop in the bucket difference.
So is a large part of lemmy.world cached on sh.itjust.works' server? Does Pixelfed, Loops or Peertube work the same way? I could see images or video being more of a burden to serve like that. Or does AP sync the metadata like thumbnail, video title, description, comments etc. and the video itself is torrented straight from the host server?
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Good keep those numb nuts away. Reddit sucks not only because of Spez and his greedy overlords, many of the users suck as well and I bet there is a big overlap on the Venn diagram between people who suck and people who think lemmy is confusing
This is what we call "dipshit energy".
The fediverse is confusing and that's bad. It should be less confusing, and there should be less people making comments like that one. Quit it.
We'll get there sooner or later. Hopefully sooner.
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Join-lemmy provides a subpar experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536
Pull requests are more than welcome to improve the site. Its basic Typescript, TailwindCSS and Inferno.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site
You can also make changes to the documentation, its markdown just like Lemmy itself. So if you would write something differently then open a pull request and change it!
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If they find Lemmy "too hard to understand", do we really want them here?
Gatekeeping at its finest.
I for one would welcome anybody here who wants to come. Rather them than more people with your mindset.
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I don't get how people get hung on choosing a server when people have been chosing a starter Pokémon since 1998 without any major issues. And you get just about the "same" amount of practical info.
Really, what tiktok does to a generation...
This is how I ended up on a German server. I don’t speak German but really isn’t an issue. Just pick one.
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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.
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.
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The one thing that I like about the fediverse is that it somehow unintentionally has a filter to keep the low effort people from poisoning the well.
I have been on the fediverse from 2019 and these types of arguments have been floated times and again at each exodus wave. they expect to be offered everything on a silver platter. they come into a new platform maintained by hobbyists and good will people and they expect it to offer the same features, experiences and user base or even better than the once on proprietary media that spend billions of dollars to acquire that user base. they get screwed by one company and hope that another for profit won't do the same. Lemmy is even easier than email, as you don't need to know the handle of people of communities you interact with you just search for them or explore the public feed. We don't need them here.
there are many aspects the fediverse can improve upon. decentralization or federation isn't one of them
Agreed, to a certain extent. The internet was a much better place when it took at least a little effort and knowledge to join in and participate. Barriers can be a good thing.
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Look I don't have any data to back it up, only my experience and many others (eg. https://lemmy.ca/comment/14524858)
I'm also not going to go try and dig up all the evidence to try and prove this to you.
I am a IT professional and have been part of developing many web apps that see tens of thousands of users per day.
We would do AB testing to see what works for users and what gets a better click through rate etc.As soon as a user needs to think, they drop off like crazy, that's just a fact you can look up good UX design.
It's also a fact that joining lemmy requires a lot of thinking and tweaking etc. to get to a good place.I've been using lemmy for months now, and I'm still not happy with the UI even after tweaking and trying many different things.
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.
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So is a large part of lemmy.world cached on sh.itjust.works' server? Does Pixelfed, Loops or Peertube work the same way? I could see images or video being more of a burden to serve like that. Or does AP sync the metadata like thumbnail, video title, description, comments etc. and the video itself is torrented straight from the host server?
Pretty much, yes. Images is cached. Video is not. However PeerTube supports P2P.
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"You can access all content from the Lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn't matter which you choose" 1. not strictly true and 2. if it doesn't matter why make the choice?
This is a great point. If it doesn't matter, why not randomly assign you to an instance? The reality is that it does because some instances are political, and some federate with other instances that could give a negative impression of Lemmy. By people recommending particular instances to sign up to, shows that there's an element of calculation as to which instance to pick.
Onto your second point, your impact would be negligible. I wouldn't worry about that scenario.
I could see a "choose for me" button, kind of like installing an OS where you can go with the automatic stuff or set it up yourself. I think you'd need several instances to get with join-lemmy.org to volunteer to be one of the ones that would sign people up for.
Folks who want to sign up for a specific instance in order to create or maybe moderate a community there almost certainly won't go to join-lemmy.org for that, they'll just go to that instance.
There may need to be a "Hey could we cool it with the fukpolitik' agreement to be on that random sign-up list; I'm not sure I'd drop random folks into ex-Hexbear or whatever.
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"but it feels like old reddit". My god, imagine actively preferring the new reddit UI. Let them keep their shiny jangling keys instead of coming over here and pestering the devs for a snoovatar feature or whatever nonsense.
The 'maybe read for 2 minutes to figure it out' miniscule barrier to entry is a feature not a bug.
It's been a while since I've been on Lemmy, so correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Voyager, which I' using right now, pretty good? You also don't have to install an app, even though the apps on the Google Play store are pretty good.
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Damn right, I'm only on Lemmy because there isnt a better alternative, not because its great.
The sad fact is that for social media to not suck you need moderation, for moderation not to suck they need to be paid mods, which means it has to make money somehow, which either means adds, subscriptions or mining user data...
You don't need paid mods. If you have a good community people will volunteer to moderate out of altruism, because they enjoy the community and want to make sure it stays good. Paid mods are actually worse than volunteer mods imo, because they don't actually care as much.
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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?
A lot of disingenuous Lemmy users in that thread pretending that picking a server is more confusing than filing your taxes. I think join-lemmy should probably hot-list like 6 or 7 servers instead of making you choose via a primary interest, since you can migrate your account later anyway. But I am personally not tech oriented and managed to make an account and find an app without an issue.
