Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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Well, when I started to use lemmy I had a few problems:
- I read something on the landing page about "Mastodon account works too" so tried that, so basically confused fediverse, activitypub, mastodon and lemmy and wondered why nothing worked. Oops.
- I tried to join a community that was meant to migrate away from reddit, but found two duplicates. So I wasn't sure which one was the correct one. Ultimately the migration failed, even though it was a software oriented community
- Then I soon wanted to make a new account on a server that doesn't require an email. Because emails today are basically personally identifiable for security agencies.
- Then I found out that socialists are called tankies on lemmy and some of the main socialist instances are banned by the limbrols. So I made a new account and posted a little and had an interesting discussion about voting in proto-fascist democracies and promptly got banned by the tankies. Oh well.
- Then I had a discussion about how calling russian people "orcs" is racist. You guessed it, banned.
- Well several accounts later, here I am, the last sane man on the internet and you all fucking suck hahaha
I do think lemmy is worthwhile and can be fun, but as a reddit alternative it has already failed. You cannot purge insanity by splitting it up into smaller insanlets. That's just schizophrenia.
Your #4 seems inaccurate, unless you were just walking us through your changing perspective as you joined.
This place is very left leaning and I’m sure it’s loaded with people who happily call themselves socialists while shouting down the MLs/tankies.
The main difference afaik is that they support authoritarians.
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I love this! Totally agree, and you know what? I don't need to give you an "award" and enrich the site owners with unnecessary money waste. I hope it never changes too. Quality over quantity.
The best reward on a Lemmy comment is an interesting and thoughtful reply.
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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?
"bad ux? bad ui?"
i am a graphic designer!!! i only use linux and open source software like inkscape!! yea let's go!! fediverse -
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 don't think it's UI issue. I think it's a traffic issue.
People go to a social media site because it's where everyone else is.
But the nature of the federation is that you end up with silos of traffic, and those silos are too small to keep content flowing, which stifles community engagement and subsequently growth. For every 10 people that see a post, one will like it enough to vote on it. Out of those people, 1 in 10 will be engaged enough to actually post. If they post and get no response, they lose interest in re-posting.
The strength of Reddit was that it allowed everyone to talk about everything at once, and it became the de-facto hub of the internet for many folks. You go onto /r/all and you'd get the sense that the world is there, flowing past. You don't really get that on lemmy or mastodon servers unless you make an active effort to go and subscribe to things.
A solution to this is, actually, more federation. Many lemmy instances could band together by building a front page interface that combined all of the best posts across servers. This would improve the speed and flow of content dramatically. Think of it as alliance like the old web-rings of the early days of the internet, but in this situation, you're posting the content of all your allied federated servers, and they're posting yours. Thus, when someone goes to lemmy.world, they really see the whole world of lemmy, not just this one instance.
This would draw in new users more than any interface update, IMHO. It also would serve as a great place for them to start to discover what they want to subscribe to and participate in, providing a far wider choice than any one instance on its own can provide.
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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?
Add a bell button and a whistle button.
I think instead of promoting a page where people have to choose a server, just send people to lemmy.world directly. We should probably just get people to sign up there at first and have the ability to migrate their accounts to other servers if they want to do that later.
Having to choose from multiple servers is asking people to choose between a bunch of options they know nothing about. Get people straight to looking at content and posting stuff as soon as possible, once they're more invested, and understand more about the different instances they can change servers if that's what they want to do.
But yeah writhing the code needed to make account migration seamless might be a lot of work so not sure if that will happen.
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I don't think it's UI issue. I think it's a traffic issue.
People go to a social media site because it's where everyone else is.
But the nature of the federation is that you end up with silos of traffic, and those silos are too small to keep content flowing, which stifles community engagement and subsequently growth. For every 10 people that see a post, one will like it enough to vote on it. Out of those people, 1 in 10 will be engaged enough to actually post. If they post and get no response, they lose interest in re-posting.
The strength of Reddit was that it allowed everyone to talk about everything at once, and it became the de-facto hub of the internet for many folks. You go onto /r/all and you'd get the sense that the world is there, flowing past. You don't really get that on lemmy or mastodon servers unless you make an active effort to go and subscribe to things.
A solution to this is, actually, more federation. Many lemmy instances could band together by building a front page interface that combined all of the best posts across servers. This would improve the speed and flow of content dramatically. Think of it as alliance like the old web-rings of the early days of the internet, but in this situation, you're posting the content of all your allied federated servers, and they're posting yours. Thus, when someone goes to lemmy.world, they really see the whole world of lemmy, not just this one instance.
This would draw in new users more than any interface update, IMHO. It also would serve as a great place for them to start to discover what they want to subscribe to and participate in, providing a far wider choice than any one instance on its own can provide.
More federation is good, but lemmy had a defederation fiasco when everyone was paying attention.
People have enough of that IRL and want a truly global community.
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We could stop bullying .ml users for being .ml users. That's the only "war" I have seen here.
For real. I've seen people being dicks from every instance. I see far more .world peeps going into a frenzy because their world view was slightly critiqued than crazy tankie takes. Not saying those don't happen, and fuck tankies, but there's definitely more whining "fuck .ml" memes I see. It's just jingoistic bullshit. This is the Internet, nothing you do here really matters. Get the fuck over yourselves.
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LEMMY IS FUN PLEASE
Yes it is
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For real. I've seen people being dicks from every instance. I see far more .world peeps going into a frenzy because their world view was slightly critiqued than crazy tankie takes. Not saying those don't happen, and fuck tankies, but there's definitely more whining "fuck .ml" memes I see. It's just jingoistic bullshit. This is the Internet, nothing you do here really matters. Get the fuck over yourselves.
Yeah I prefer to judge people by their actions rather than what instance they're from. If I did, I would assume every feddit.uk user eats beans and toast for breakfast.
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It's very common, but in Australia at least, no ubiquitous
Most businesses also use outlook or gmail
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Add a bell button and a whistle button.
I think instead of promoting a page where people have to choose a server, just send people to lemmy.world directly. We should probably just get people to sign up there at first and have the ability to migrate their accounts to other servers if they want to do that later.
Having to choose from multiple servers is asking people to choose between a bunch of options they know nothing about. Get people straight to looking at content and posting stuff as soon as possible, once they're more invested, and understand more about the different instances they can change servers if that's what they want to do.
But yeah writhing the code needed to make account migration seamless might be a lot of work so not sure if that will happen.
You need to give people the photon link: https://photon.lemmy.world/
Lemmy has multiple view options, photon is the one that looks the most/exactly like Reddit.
The other view options are;
https://a.lemmy.world - Alexandrite UI
https://photon.lemmy.world - Photon UI
https://m.lemmy.world - Voyager mobile UI
https://old.lemmy.world - A familiar UI -
I don't think it's UI issue. I think it's a traffic issue.
People go to a social media site because it's where everyone else is.
But the nature of the federation is that you end up with silos of traffic, and those silos are too small to keep content flowing, which stifles community engagement and subsequently growth. For every 10 people that see a post, one will like it enough to vote on it. Out of those people, 1 in 10 will be engaged enough to actually post. If they post and get no response, they lose interest in re-posting.
The strength of Reddit was that it allowed everyone to talk about everything at once, and it became the de-facto hub of the internet for many folks. You go onto /r/all and you'd get the sense that the world is there, flowing past. You don't really get that on lemmy or mastodon servers unless you make an active effort to go and subscribe to things.
A solution to this is, actually, more federation. Many lemmy instances could band together by building a front page interface that combined all of the best posts across servers. This would improve the speed and flow of content dramatically. Think of it as alliance like the old web-rings of the early days of the internet, but in this situation, you're posting the content of all your allied federated servers, and they're posting yours. Thus, when someone goes to lemmy.world, they really see the whole world of lemmy, not just this one instance.
This would draw in new users more than any interface update, IMHO. It also would serve as a great place for them to start to discover what they want to subscribe to and participate in, providing a far wider choice than any one instance on its own can provide.
I had no idea I wasn't actually seeing the front page of everything
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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?
Kind of wishing for a light mode. I like to keep things light during the day, and dark at night. Crazy right?
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I don't think it's UI issue. I think it's a traffic issue.
People go to a social media site because it's where everyone else is.
But the nature of the federation is that you end up with silos of traffic, and those silos are too small to keep content flowing, which stifles community engagement and subsequently growth. For every 10 people that see a post, one will like it enough to vote on it. Out of those people, 1 in 10 will be engaged enough to actually post. If they post and get no response, they lose interest in re-posting.
The strength of Reddit was that it allowed everyone to talk about everything at once, and it became the de-facto hub of the internet for many folks. You go onto /r/all and you'd get the sense that the world is there, flowing past. You don't really get that on lemmy or mastodon servers unless you make an active effort to go and subscribe to things.
A solution to this is, actually, more federation. Many lemmy instances could band together by building a front page interface that combined all of the best posts across servers. This would improve the speed and flow of content dramatically. Think of it as alliance like the old web-rings of the early days of the internet, but in this situation, you're posting the content of all your allied federated servers, and they're posting yours. Thus, when someone goes to lemmy.world, they really see the whole world of lemmy, not just this one instance.
This would draw in new users more than any interface update, IMHO. It also would serve as a great place for them to start to discover what they want to subscribe to and participate in, providing a far wider choice than any one instance on its own can provide.
If I understand it correctly you want something like what Mastodon has, splitting "your stream" and "world stream", being the second the default one. Am I right?
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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?
Yep. I came, couldn't get into it, https://lemmy.world/post/1388830 and unfortunately went back to Reddit.
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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?
Whether these are just lazy excuses or not, but let's be real for a moment.
Imagine someone, who's used to go to reddit.com, search for a reddit app in the app store, both of which have the same logo, design, etc... and use their username/password to login and browse the content.
almost every service, that people use for the last decades is based on this specific approach, except for emails. Even the TLD was always .com
Now imagine, how overwhelmed those people might feel, when you tell them "just come over to lemmy".
Lemmy, where? lemmy.com? Here's where you than start explaining the different instances, federation, etc..
the next question will be: where's the Lemmy app? Remember, the unified logo and design? well, good luck explaining that all lemmy apps are de facto third-party-apps.
Now, once they make it throug all of that, the next hurdle that will confuse the hell out of them are the communities scattered all across the instances.
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Whether these are just lazy excuses or not, but let's be real for a moment.
Imagine someone, who's used to go to reddit.com, search for a reddit app in the app store, both of which have the same logo, design, etc... and use their username/password to login and browse the content.
almost every service, that people use for the last decades is based on this specific approach, except for emails. Even the TLD was always .com
Now imagine, how overwhelmed those people might feel, when you tell them "just come over to lemmy".
Lemmy, where? lemmy.com? Here's where you than start explaining the different instances, federation, etc..
the next question will be: where's the Lemmy app? Remember, the unified logo and design? well, good luck explaining that all lemmy apps are de facto third-party-apps.
Now, once they make it throug all of that, the next hurdle that will confuse the hell out of them are the communities scattered all across the instances.
"Lemmy has 47k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
Pinned post on [email protected]
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Kind of wishing for a light mode. I like to keep things light during the day, and dark at night. Crazy right?
You can choose the light theme in your settings
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Fully agree with that, the bar is too to high usually unless you're being handheld through the process, realistically there should be an app like how blue sky is that doesn't give you any of the options because less options means easier setup. If they want to jump instances after that that would be considered an advanced function but they can choose to do so on their own accord.
Another issue I think is lack of actual awareness, like Bsky got media coverage, the everyday person still is like "the hells a lemmy"
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I don't think it's UI issue. I think it's a traffic issue.
People go to a social media site because it's where everyone else is.
But the nature of the federation is that you end up with silos of traffic, and those silos are too small to keep content flowing, which stifles community engagement and subsequently growth. For every 10 people that see a post, one will like it enough to vote on it. Out of those people, 1 in 10 will be engaged enough to actually post. If they post and get no response, they lose interest in re-posting.
The strength of Reddit was that it allowed everyone to talk about everything at once, and it became the de-facto hub of the internet for many folks. You go onto /r/all and you'd get the sense that the world is there, flowing past. You don't really get that on lemmy or mastodon servers unless you make an active effort to go and subscribe to things.
A solution to this is, actually, more federation. Many lemmy instances could band together by building a front page interface that combined all of the best posts across servers. This would improve the speed and flow of content dramatically. Think of it as alliance like the old web-rings of the early days of the internet, but in this situation, you're posting the content of all your allied federated servers, and they're posting yours. Thus, when someone goes to lemmy.world, they really see the whole world of lemmy, not just this one instance.
This would draw in new users more than any interface update, IMHO. It also would serve as a great place for them to start to discover what they want to subscribe to and participate in, providing a far wider choice than any one instance on its own can provide.
A solution to this is, actually, more federation. Many lemmy instances could band together by building a front page interface that combined all of the best posts across servers
Isn't that All?
