Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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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.
Volunteers are a double edged sword. At some volume of users and content it either needs to be a huge team of like minded volunteers which increases the likelihood of ye power tripping bastards or someone who is paid to do it and spend the time with rules to follow.
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Maybe better TLDR of how it works will help people realise it doesn't matter too much which instance they pick
I mean, I lost all my old posts (or at least access to them) when two instances I was on just poof'd.
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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?
It's shocking to me just how stupid the average person is today. Computing catering to the lowest common denominator has made it too easy for idiots. Make computing difficult again; make people actually have to learn something. A tall order for the idiocracy of 2025.
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feels like old reddit
They obviously haven't visited https://old.lemmy.world/
oh shit that's awesome almost makes me want to not use sync anymore
almost
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Some instances have very different rules on them that would affect your experience. Like not allowing downvotes, for example. Blahaj users can't see downvotes or downvote anything themselves.
Yeah, true. But that’s cool. Having choice like that is great!
But I suppose that’s the issue. Trying to keep signup simple to help drive user engagement. How much do you try to wrap someone’s head around such nuanced differences, and when do you say “just join me on my instance”?
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Quality content as usual. I appreciate the thought you've put into this and agree with your reasoning.
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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?
(Guy who uses email at work): MuLtIpLe sErVeRs ArE tOo HaRd
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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?
It's worse than reddit. It's more liberal.
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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’m fine with the effort bar being selecting an instance. If someone can’t get beyond that, there’s probably not much they have to say I’d be interested in.
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It's worse than reddit. It's more liberal.
Oh, cool, a new account to block.
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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?
That bar to entry is a good thing; it helps keep most of the stupid out. The same stupid that ruined the rest of the internet.
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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.
You could also use revanced and patch the reddit apk on android.
No adds etc.
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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?
99% of users are going to check out when you ask which server they want to join
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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.
In their defense, the reddit UI did suck and the webpage was barely functional for a very, very long time. How many years did it take them to get video to be even passably functional?
Almost every Lemmy interface is an order of magnitude better than anything reddit has ever managed to produce. Voyager is a pleasure imo.
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I’m fine with the effort bar being selecting an instance. If someone can’t get beyond that, there’s probably not much they have to say I’d be interested in.
Likewise, lol. A little friction keeps the chaff out.
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Maybe it's more like picking a football team
It's closer to that yes, and you don't really know whar a football team is
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i came here to say the same thing! if people actually genuinely like the new reddit ui, those people might just want and need different things out of a website than we do, and trying to onboard them might be a fool's errand. not to be a gatekeeper, i'd love if everyone quit the corporate web, but a lot of the things people complain about here like the ui and the decentrilization are why i'm here (in my case mbin) and not there to begin with
same thing with mastodon, people still rail against it's ui but the ui was a big reason i even made a mastodon long before twitter was bought out, back when they first tried to phase out the chronological timeline
Yeah like. I want a large community and stuff but. The idea of a new Reddit preferring community is weirdly repellent.
I really don’t want to hate on their preferences but also holy shit.
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"Here's Lemmy. It's like Reddit. There's a bunch of different websites for it, but they all have basically the same things on them. Just join one near you, if you don't like it you can always use a different one later"
That would help if they had a clue which one was near them.
Default to "nearest" one?
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Thats funny, Im also 32 and completely happy with the default Lemmy UI. Definitely wouldnt use something like new Reddit. But the good thing is that there are so many different choices, and its possible to create instances with a different default UI.
We could do AB testing and see what users prefer.
Or at least change the Default Ui to adhere to good UX design principles
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A/B testing is not really possible in a decentralized system like this, it would require all instance admins to collaborate for collecting results, and would make deployment much more complicated. Not to forget that there simply arent enough development resources to implement it. That said if you see anything that can be improved, you're welcome to make a pull request. Its standard Typescript wit TailwindCSS and Inferno, nothing complicated.
You don't have to AB test all instances, we can do smaller tests.
But yea that's complicated and takes effort, instead we should at least follow good UX design principles for the default UX
