Defaults are crucial for good UX and getting more users on the Fediverse
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Agreed. And the default UI hasn't even gotten attention in the past. It's just there. My experience with Lemmy has been that the devs fix bugs, but they're mostly focused on the backend. I'm not sure aboit the consequences, though. A lot of people seem to be using phone apps, so their default might not even be Lemmy's UX.
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What makes you think it sucks? That's just your opinion, do you mainly just look at image posts? Personally I prefer posts being collapsed by default so I can scroll through and find the interesting ones. Arbitrarily setting one thing as the default is just as bad as setting another.
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I agree, a gateway drug is what we are looking for. Imagine trying to learn how to run before you learned how to walk. We are asking a lot of the masses if we want to see user growth here without a simple and easy to understand starting place.
I think the hardest concept for beginners to grok is that they can’t login with one account to all instances. If we were to improve the UX around that experience solely, we would see greater adoption.
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sh.itjust.work - shit in the name, not appealing to the average user
I really don't understand how this is actually a problem. It's just "shit", that's very moderate profanity.
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Yeah also the blocking instances capabilities on Lemmy are a fucking joke
Block an instance at user level? You still have to deal with their users and you see crossposts
Defederate an instance? You still see their crossposts if someone from another instance does it
What part of that counts as blocking? It should be as nuclear as possible, that's what blocking is for, because someone doesn't want anything to do with them.Also I know Lemmy is not private, but not being able to completely delete posts/comments still irks me.
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So one thing I wonder is if there would be some way that when they are creating an account, for them to put some info in- mostly language spoken and maybe preferred country to start and it randomly selects a default general interest server. That might help onboard people easier without everyone joining one instance
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Years ago I did a UX study on Lemmy's frontend, and tbh not much has changed since. Things like when editing a thread, the Save button is multiple proximity separators apart from the text you're editing, making it very easy to missclick cancel. Or in the community search, you can't search on specific instances that aren't yours.
I've gotten very used to the UI over time but it definitely needs a "pain point" passover
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Does lemm.ee have as obvious a political stance as LW?
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The only time I've seen my instance brought up in comments and whatnot is in discussions about how we don't block any other instances. I'm out here rawdawgging all the propaganda baby
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But it's not serious and evokes images of a spotty teenager in a basement.
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What "obvious" political stance might that be?
To me, it's "somewhere on the progressive side of the median" but I'm almost expecting you to say "fascist" or something, given the extent of America's polarization.
Another thing: in popular communities the comments are coming from all over, so without keeping a mental tally of everyone's usernames I find it's getting quite hard to pin down any particular instance's biases.
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A geographically based default is a great idea.
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I always use an app so I barely interact with the web ui
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Lemm.ee tries to be as middle-ground as possible and defederates from no "controversial" instances
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Which in turn is probably the reason why the devs dont focus on Web ui
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won’t recommend Lemmy to many of my friends or family because I know they will give up
Yeah, when I first started out here, my experience was like this:
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I went to the join Lemmy page, then clicked to show all servers. Then waited. And waited. Then I went to bed.
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By the next morning, the list of servers had managed to load. I spotted one that was advertised as "recommended for users to join to reduce load on the Fediverse", which seemed like a good idea after seeing how even the join page was battling to load.
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Found out that the server I joined seemed to have all sorts of issues loading content. And was apparently de-federated from a bunch of instances that align with my interests. So search results were showing me little to nothing in regards to queer communities for example, only dead communities.
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Signed up on world instead and encountered multiple posts that said they had comments but loaded nothing. Found out that there were no languages selected in my settings. So I selected 'undefined', scrolled down, selected 'English', then saved.
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I was still missing a bunch of posts after that, so I went back to settings and saw that 'undefined' was deselected again. That's when I realised that you have to ctrl click each language you choose or else it just deselects the previous language that you clicked on.
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Finally success! 3 or 4 days later. And now I'm here.
I would love to recommend Lemmy to the few people I know who use Reddit. But I can't see any of them trying without just giving up and going back to the place where all you need to do is sign up and hey presto, content to look at and interact with.
I have a feeling that even the process of choosing an instance would probably put them off. I could give advice but there's only so much I could do or explain without being there in person helping them. If they have to read walls of text explaining how to get started, it would probably end there.
I'm not sure what the solution is though, or if there even is one. It might just be a little bit like trying to recommend Linux to people who just want to be able to push a button and go. Which is the majority, based on what I've seen.
Also just one last thing and something that has been discussed to death. There's just not enough content here yet for the average person to see any reason to switch over from the place with all the content.
And on that note, recommending this place to people that I know in real life would be too risky right now that they would see my account and figure out who I am. Because there isn't a crowd of a million people to slip into and disappear here. And this isn't Facebook. I don't want people to know about the very personal things I sometimes say on anonymous social media.
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honestly when I joined I thought it was "shhh 🤫 it just works"
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Neoliberal is what I’m referring to.
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Haha, I am too
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This was exactly my point! "Neoliberal."
