Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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People are still on Twitter while the owner makes Nazi salutes and Bluesky is a 1:1 replacement feature-wise with a modern interface. People just don't like to move.
The fact that Bluesky is almost a 1:1 copy (which includes the dumb stuff like post character limit) is precisely why I don't like it.
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Right, but that's the issue. It can give them an extremist instance and they join and get banned and never come back. The instance matters, and they know that intuitively, which is why they have choice paralysis in the first place. We should help them choose by providing information about each instance.
Right, but that's the issue. It can give them an extremist instance
Yeah but that's just join-lemmy, someone could make their own website that doesn't have this issue, even without overloading the user with info. It should only show instances that are middle of the road general instances.
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Is there even a point to which one you pick? I just picked .kbin because I liked the UI, and when that fell apart I moved to .world mostly at random.
Is there really a large difference between them?
I picked ani because I don't have to sub to every anime community, I can just go to the Local view and get everything I need.
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it 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
Tech savvy would be to start your instances. Going through the process of picking an instance and registering there is no more tech savvy than registering with facebook or any other online site. The complexity keeping people away isn't technical, it's domain specific. People don't know how to choose an instance because they're not given enough information to actually tell instances apart.
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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?
Aren't you guys sick of forced infinite growth in every aspect of our collective existence? The Fediverse is not shareholder owned, we don't have to be slaves to The Red Line That Must Go Up. Reddit went to shit when it was aggresively mainstreamed, I don't want it to happen to lemmy as well.
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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?
From everyone looking in: what the fuck is, ok, was Hexbear, why should I care and wtf can't I read anything from that place.
Same with registration, instances, etc. It's explained nowhere where how and why and i never have found a complete index with instances and communities.
I only can use lemmy because of sync. Yes, I'm also a reddit refugee.
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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?
phtn.app client is amazing. looks modern and beautiful.
Can recommend
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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?
Leave the micropenis guys alone, it's already a shit card to be dealt.
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Volunteers are a double edged sword. At some volume of users and content it either needs to be a huge team of like minded volunteers which increases the likelihood of ye power tripping bastards or someone who is paid to do it and spend the time with rules to follow.
Maybe. But Lemmy isn't close to that volume of users yet
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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
Like I said you're welcome to make pull requests. Lemmy is not a corporation employing multiple designers, but an open source project run by volunteers. So if you want to see something done, it's best to do it yourself.
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Aren't you guys sick of forced infinite growth in every aspect of our collective existence? The Fediverse is not shareholder owned, we don't have to be slaves to The Red Line That Must Go Up. Reddit went to shit when it was aggresively mainstreamed, I don't want it to happen to lemmy as well.
The problem is that in order to become a proper reddit replacement Lemmy needs enough users to create niche communities.
There are plenty of active communities related to technology and politics but there is no equivalent to r/batmanarkham or r/letgirlshavefun.
Plus there are plenty of communities that are all but abandoned.
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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?
People forget that user experience isn't just the stuff on the screen you interact with. There is a governance piece that is lacking in a lot of instances, and in the open source community as a whole. A lot of the successful projects out there are backed by some kind of foundation.
Take a look at the latest Hexbear drama. Some person out there owned the domain for their instance and let it expire. Now they are in a bidding war with a crypto site with a hexagon-related name. If they had formed some kind of organization or entity that registered the domain and owned the instance, this probably wouldn't have happened. Their users wouldn't get redirected to a domain auction site when trying to access the site. That's not an ideal user experience. It destroys trust.
SDF being a 501(c)(7) is one of the reasons that it's my home instance. For me, it provides a level of trust that an instance run by some random person on the internet doesn't. If there is a big federation/defederation debate, then it's really up to the membership to decide, and not a collection of admins or a single person getting the vibe of the users.
Another thing to remember is that Lemmy really shouldn't be competing against Reddit. The purpose of Reddit is to have the user generate content in order to keep the user's attention on the site so they can sell targeted advertisements. This is the basic business model for all of commercial social media. It has nothing to do with creating communities. That is secondary. If you want more people on Lemmy so that there is more content for you to consume, just stay on Reddit or TikTok. They need to sell ads in order to fund model training to keep your engagement up in order to sell more ads in order to provide quarterly growth to their shareholders. If you want more people on Lemmy because more brains mean better communities, then focus the communities.
The real opportunity for the fediverse is getting a lot of the existing non-profits, social organizations, and other types of communities to set up their own instances. This answers the “what instance do I join?” question by joining the instance associated with the community you're already involved in. Another reason I'm on SDF is retro computing. If you're really into your local makerspace, then you probably have a community ready to go for a Lemmy instance. If you're involved in your HOA and you all have a Facebook page or are all over Nextdoor, maybe set up a Lemmy instance. In all these cases, the organizational infrastructure is there for the administrative stuff like getting a domain and paying for hosting.
Also, I'm old enough to remember that Facebook took off when everyone's parents started joining. Imagine if the AARP rolled out a Lemmy instance. They are big enough put some serious money into development. You would probably get a lot of accessibility improvements.
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Is there even a point to which one you pick? I just picked .kbin because I liked the UI, and when that fell apart I moved to .world mostly at random.
Is there really a large difference between them?
I picked world cuz it was by far the biggest at the time
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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!"
This is basically the solution. Just give a few words to explain that different servers can have some rules differences and offer the easy join button.
Get people onboarded fast and easy! If they want to, they can learn more afterwards.
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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.
What the federse needs is an app that makes the concept intuitive. I've been toying with an idea and how to monetize it, but I have no knowledge on how to actually make it
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Isn't the "tiling" view on PieFed like that? Link
I guess so. Every Lemmy app I've used also offers similar views.
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If they find Lemmy "too hard to understand", do we really want them here?
Pre-emptive defederation
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You could also use revanced and patch the reddit apk on android.
No adds etc.
Well, one of the reasons why I used 3rd party apps to begin with was because the mobile Reddit app was an unoptimized buggy mess for me, which often overheated my phone.
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Aren't you guys sick of forced infinite growth in every aspect of our collective existence? The Fediverse is not shareholder owned, we don't have to be slaves to The Red Line That Must Go Up. Reddit went to shit when it was aggresively mainstreamed, I don't want it to happen to lemmy as well.
I agree with you, but at the same time if there aren't enough users, small and niche sublemmys will never grow and have enough content to be interesting.
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It's shocking to me just how stupid the average person is today. Computing catering to the lowest common denominator has made it too easy for idiots. Make computing difficult again; make people actually have to learn something. A tall order for the idiocracy of 2025.
I miss those times when you actually had to learn a lot of things before being able to write stuff on the internet.
