Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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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.
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Exactly this - Join-Lemmy.org has some (minor) UI and text issues. I'm also not quite happy about the sorting of the instances and the selection there. If f.e. you chose "General -> English" during onboarding, you get this screen here:
Hexbear? Some random 11 user instance from finland? Lemmy.world nowhere to be seen? They are randomizing the instances, which kind of makes sense to prevent the bigger ones from growing even more, but which might confuse new users.
But those are minor UI quirks that can be solved. All those reddit couch warriors that claim that everything should be completely redone exactly how they want it to be are insane. Normal users are able to understand the concept of instances.
Lemmy.world is excluded because it represents more than 30% of all active Lemmy users, thats too much. And yes the list is somewhat randomized. Youre welcome to improve all this.
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Gatekeeping at its finest.
I for one would welcome anybody here who wants to come. Rather them than more people with your mindset.
Both can be true. We can welcome everybody who wants to come, and also realize that having 100 million complete noobs suddenly join wouldn't necessarily be the best outcome either.
Show people the way and if they indicate that it's too much effort to do a bit of research for 10-20 minutes, understand that it's not exactly a huge loss for them to not join.
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Picking a starter is easy. Everyone knows that pokémon is a game about collecting creatures, and everyone knows what fire/ water/ grass is, so no one's gonna be stumped. Not everyone is gonna immediately know what an instance is, or what it does, or what it's there for
Im a french canadian plumber, nothing scream "have you tried unplugging and pluggin it again" more than that, yet here i am?
The people still on reddit will die with it, it's where they made their home and there will always be a reason to stay.
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I would love info/data-sheets about all the instances, that would make the decision process easier:
- who de-federated who?
- who hosts most content related to topic X?
- number of users and their distribution of joined communities
- posts/second average user activity …
You can find the defederation info quite easily just by asking, or going to the blocked instance tab on whatever server you're wondering about.
Your other questions are somewhat ambiguous, so there's no easy way to simplify it into a data sheet. Because of the fact that the vast majority of instances are federated with each other, it also doesn't matter that much.
I don't think that kind of numerical information would really make the decision any easier, it'd be more likely to confuse people even further.
Servers are either general purpose or with a specific focus. Ani.social, ttrpg.network, slrpnk.net, are servers that clearly advertise the specific content they host and focus on. And obviously the geographical/language based servers (feddit.uk, aussie.zone, lemmy.nz) do the same thing. That's pretty easy to figure out imho.
The distribution of joined communities just seems way more complicated than necessary. Number of users is already the most widely available stat, just go to fedidb or lemmyverse and you can easily see tye list of instances ordered by monthly active users.
https://lemmyverse.net/?order=active_month
I do think a cheat sheet about defederations would be nice to have though, I might try to make one when I have a chance.
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Reddit being popular is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy.
When you get right down to it: people don't care that Reddit is selling their information, that the site itself is a piece of garbage, that running the site requires a bunch of no-life weirdos whose numbers will only increase going forward and whose power will likewise, or that the design actively encourages bots to the point of disincentivizing actual human beings from using it.
They want their memes, they want their news, they want their niche little interest subs and they want their porn. The simple fact is that lemmy is a smaller version of Reddit with fewer options and to the majority of people who don't care about their data or the objectively dogshit running of the site, there is no reason to cross over to Lemmy.
Until Reddit takes a Musk-type turn into being totally unuseable, lemmy will only see a trickle of users who are burned by Reddit.
I use Stealth with the express intent of not contributing to Reddit (there are no ads on Stealth) while consuming their server's resources. It's a sort of protest in its own way. Especially since those niche interest subs are the only way I could quickly get information about the community without having to scroll through discord servers— hell, in Lemmy-Kbin most of them are run by bots reposting from Reddit, and there is no way I can manage or advertise my own magazine, what with my busy schedule in my university.
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I'm fine with that while it lasts. Having millions of active users would increase the feed, but it's not going to increase the likelihood of me talking to anyone smart
Agreed. Also if we're being honest servers would probably start crashing left right and center if ten million redditors decided to join next week. The software still needs time to mature, so slow and steady growth is actually perfect for right now.
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the fact that you notice decentralization as a user can be a problem for many
How would you notice though? I don't see how a user would be aware of defederation unless they look at the block list.
When I say decentralization I refer to the fact that it is federated. Not sure what you mean.
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I don't think these people actually want to leave reddit. They are only interested in farming karma by complaining about it,
This is a good point. And also reddit is astroturfing hardcore, it's likely that many comments are coming from botted accounts and especially upvotes are heavily manipulated.
I'm not disagreeing with the fact that a lot of people genuinely struggle to get started on Lemmy. But just pointing out that perception is actively amplified on reddit, because they obviously want to discourage people from joining Lemmy.
It's not a conspiracy at all, I've seen countless positive comments and posts about Lemmy removed over the past year or so. They know about us and they are worried.
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There is a reason such a large part of Lemmy is developers. There's no confusion signing up for the developers. Federations and servers and instances are all crazy jargon to regular people. Although we may not want all regular types here, having some more regular people to balance out all the high IQ techies could make things more fun.
Tbf I think it takes just a little web litteracy to understand the fediverse. I know I'm a developper, so I tried explaining it to my bro and he got it on the first try.
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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!
Thanks for reminding.
I'm more busy on [email protected] at the moment but I might give it a go at some point.
Just seems strange to have so many people wanting to fix this in this thread without actually acting
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Yea but imo that's part of the problem. I use sync because it makes it easy, but I've tried to figure out how to access lemmy on desktop and it's non-trivial (I still haven't bothered to figure it out, I've given up multiple times)
Copy past that into your browser, then log in with your username and password?
I'm not very tech savvy compared to a lot of Lemmings but I'm definitely above average. So I'm not trying to throw shade, just trying to help. The more people who get the hang of things is the more people who can teach others how to do it.
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When I say decentralization I refer to the fact that it is federated. Not sure what you mean.
sorry I totally misread that as defederated lol
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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 use Boost for Lemmy. The transition from Reddit was easy for me, and I know little about the fediverse other than the most basic outlines.
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They don't really need to know about that until they have had time on Lemmy to hear about what those defederated instances actually do
It will definitely impact their experience though, doesn't matter if they know or not 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?
- Stop making blanket claims about instances you like or dislike, no matter how fair you feel they may be, and don't fall for the bait of others doing it. This is just drama and is exhausting to read about.
- Instead of suggesting people "join Lemmy", say things like "Join Lemmy at programming.dev" (or whatever instance you yourself are using). Sure, "but picking a server is hard" will always probably be a complaint, but leading with the one you personally use is the best way around it. If you're on a hobby focused instance (like I am) then maybe suggest a generic instance to people outside of your hobby. Don't be afraid to suggest lemmy.world. It's better to suggest the biggest instance than endlessly debate about which one is the best to suggest.
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I read a really good article recently about how people from different generations process information differently and so their UI preferences are wildly different.
The gist of it was
- A Boomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books. They choose one by an author they know, that their friends said was good.
- A Gen Xer or a Millennial walks into a bookstore to buy a book. The check the various authors they like, check that the cover art is appealing and read the backs of the different books, figuring out which one they want to read, then they buy that one.
- A Zoomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books, and feel bombarded by the ads for books. They check the authors the influencers they subscribe to on Youtube and Tik Tok say are good. They grab one of those based on the color of the cover, ignore the back and the cover art, flip it open to a random page, read that page and if what they read grabs their their attention they buy that book, but if it doesn't, they move on.
As a result, each of these people will prefer to interact with vastly different UX.
Of course these aren't hard and fast rules, set in stone and there are tons of exceptions, but it's a definite trend.
I like how the GenX and millennial is the only example that isn't overwhelmed at first. I think it's definitely worth considering that those particular generations have a significantly greater ability and openness to learning new paradigms and adapting to new UXs, because that was something that was unavoidable for all of our formative years.
Due to the rapid pace of technological advancement from 1980-2010, it was simply necessary to adapt to brand new systems and interfaces every few years. And the rewards for doing so were enormous, so we naturally learned that if you took the time to figure out these new technologies and interfaces, you would be rewarded with much greater capabilities. For previous and subsequent generations, that process probably didn't shape their way of interacting with technology as much, so they're reluctant to put in a significant amount of effort in learning to use new technology.
