Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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I think people who claim that the UI/UX is fine are missing the point. It is fine to you, but it is not fine to whomever made the claim. And for every person that makes such claim, there are hundreds/thousands who think/feel the same but don't say anything.
Lemmy, as a community and as a project, should seriously listen more to the opinion of newcomers.
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Unlike twitter, if there are UI issues, people have a lot of options to try different clients, both mobile and web. I don't use one only, I flip between a bunch of them, both on web and mobile. Sometimes the vanilla Lemmy experience is what you want, other times someone might have made a great ui for browsing one specific community that you subscribe to.
I'm also somewhere against the argument of it being difficult to pick a server, too difficult to know if it's the right one for me, etc etc. In other parts of life, people make decisions on this all the time, day in day out, without batting an eyelid, and even on issues with a bigger impact on them, than which federated instans they sign up to a service on. Mobile phone subscriptions, which email provider you should use, what internet provider you should sign up with.
For some reason, social media seems to be one of these areas where we think it's totally fine that monopolies exist, and options are not... an option. We need to resocialise the idea that it doesn't hurt to make a conscious choice about where you lay your identity online, and what you sink your time and attention into.
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we should guide them to pick an instance or choose a default and give them the option to change.
Isn't that what most people are doing nowadays?
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I'm not suggesting its impossible to improve the UX but I a) I think thats going to be an incredibly low priority for the developers and b) I'm not sure what changes can be made to address the essential conflict between the whole point of the fediverse - decentralisation - and a sign up process that essentially hides that without taking away an informed choice.
In reality, its not really that much of a difficult concept to grasp and there are loads of resources like fedi.tips etc to help people. If the communities and content was of a sufficient quality (as oppose to quantity) people would make the fairly minimal effort to understand why the fediverse is the way it is.
And if people don't or won't thats really their call.
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Yes, and if you join a German-speaking instance as a non-German speaking user, the experience will also be subpar. Hence I talked about content, not language.
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I said it before and I'll say it again, Lemmy's (and Mastodon's) issue is that the users experience is influenced by the defederation.
The server side needs to be a decentralized database stored on a bunch of servers with all content available from one website with an API so people can develop apps for it, but otherwise the decentralization should have zero impact on what content the users have access to. In other words, do like Reddit but instead of having a ton of servers owned by AWS hosting everything, have those servers be owned by anyone who wants to host part of the database.
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When I first read it I thought they were mentioning that as a selling point! But yeah it seems like they're saying it like it's a bad thing.
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This is me. Frankly, I'm surprised people are choosing to use the new UI, but I guess maybe they only discovered reddit when it had the new UI.
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Ah, I see what you're saying. Under normal circumstances, I would suggest to new users to signup on the "flagship instance", but in Lemmy's case… nah.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not certain what content I'm not seeing because, well, I haven't seen it
. Some instances seem to do a good job of only blocking content from notoriously bad sources. -
I must be in the minority because I post so rarely that I don't sign up when I 'join' the platform, I sign up when I want to post something. When I first wanted to post something, I just joined the instance it was going to be on. (Also because it's queer, which I don't tell you about for consistency). I also don't care that much about not seeing what my instance has defederated. Or actually, not being able to comment on it, because I actually go on programming.dev sometimes, without having an account there. I don't really get it. The fact that my Instance technically requires an application might actually be a UX hurdle, but otherwise, you just click Sign Up, enter email, name, and password, and that's it, right? It could be a UX problem that you miss out on content you don't see, but you also already see a load of content that you're not going to miss out on. Tutorials on how x-instance moving works might be cool though, if they don't already exist. Making them more visible might limit the defederation FOMO.
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Boost feels a lot like rif which I was using and which shutdown made me switch to lemmy.
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The problem is trying to get people into "Lemmy", where they have to understand federation and choose an instance, etc - instead of trying to get people into a specific instance. I know you don't want one bloated instance, but if that was the mission it would be a lot easier to get people on board.
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eh, back when the "exodus" was happening it felt like every second post is about defederation. Nowadays you don't hear much about it anymore, but if you only looked back then I see how you could come to that conclusion.
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The biggest UX issues, in my opinion, is the process of choosing an instance and content discovery.
When you go to "join lemmy", rather than choosing a username, you're presented a big list of instances, and you have no idea what that means and what it means for your experience if you choose one. Even though in reality it doesn't really matter, just having the list paraylyses the user as it's not a process they're used to. Users are likely asking themselves:
- Am I going to miss out on content from other instances?
- Do I need an account per instance to interact with their communities?
Sometimes I think it would be best if we could have some kind of read-only instance people can create an account on and get stuck in first, then choose an instance to sign up to once they understand it. The instance would be locked down so they couldn't create any communities. So basically when they they're directed to join-lemmy and go to sign up, they create an account on that instance right away and get started.
