Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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Absolute centralisation caused the mess. My suggestion is just initial centralisation. It lets people get active with the platform while they figure out the basics rather than paralysing them with options up front.
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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...
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People always use the email comparison but it's really not the same, it's more complicated than that. We know it's not too much of a big deal but it is when you don't know what it means to be on a server.
I remember being presented with a choice of servers myself and wondering what on earth it meant, and just wanting to join the "default" one. Ultimately it doesn't matter too much but at the time it feels like a big hurdle.
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One central server is created. Users finally have an easy time joining lemmy and most are content with staying right where they are. A large amount of content is now centralized to one place. Suddenly, financial interests take notice of a large amount of untapped potential. Caving in to the opportunity to live an easier life under the warm blanket of money, the central server owner sells the server to the highest bidder.
The new central server owner defederates from smaller instances, eventually cutting themselves off from all other lemmy servers. Enshittification begins.
I'm sure there's reasons this couldn't happen but I think the biggest strength of lemmy is having users just randomly pick and then figure later. I started out on .world but didn't like their moderation and deceleration practices, so I moved.
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There's no "main" app. Think about Reddit before the API fees. There used to be a default app.
Which app was this? Reddit's 1st party app? I didn't think it was very popular until they did the API fees, I never used it and I don't know anyone who did.
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Fuck end users I wish people still had to write dialup scripts to connect to the internet.
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Whatever the hell the equivalent of a subreddit is called.
That's communities. Did you have issues with the communities link at the top of the page? You can switch it to the "All" view.
Also what the other comments said is good too, like for finding a very niche community I'll use https://lemmyverse.net/communities
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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.
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I guess even though you would be reducing their costs, in the spirit of the fediverse getting back to the internet’s roots, changing your instance based on the communities you interact with would kind of be like moving to a new email account host because most of the people you email are using it, which isn’t really a good or bad reason so much as a personal decision based on what you value.
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And on manual validation for sign-ups
permissions/roles could improve this a lot https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3375#issuecomment-2657753039
Give thumbs up reactions on Github so the devs know what to prioritize
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They're not communist fight communities explicitly though. I haven't joined any communist-themed communities. It's just content that kinda bubbles up left and right.
I COULD start avoiding everything ".ml", but that sounds counter-productive.
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When reddit was coming up, a big issue people had was it was too confusing with bad UI. People didn't know which subreddits to follow. Its very similar, theres just a whole other layer.
Just find a popular instance that is federated with similar instances. And making accounts are easy too, so just do it in two or three instances. Yeah it's a bit much compared to reddit, but it's very very easy.
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If that's true then the problem will solve itself when Mbin or PieFed overtakes Lemmy. The content will be there anyways, we just need to see who brings the best UX/UI
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Upvoted.
If Facebook and Apple have eroded people's brains to the point where such a simple question cannot be answered without freaking out, then we're in trouble.
Yes. Thinking ability is gone. That's of last century.
Maybe I've just written my/our answer. Fuck that's depressing. Happily I'm old - I'll be dead soon. This will be your problem.
