Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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Leave the micropenis guys alone, it's already a shit card to be dealt.
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Maybe. But Lemmy isn't close to that volume of users yet
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Like I said you're welcome to make pull requests. Lemmy is not a corporation employing multiple designers, but an open source project run by volunteers. So if you want to see something done, it's best to do it yourself.
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The problem is that in order to become a proper reddit replacement Lemmy needs enough users to create niche communities.
There are plenty of active communities related to technology and politics but there is no equivalent to r/batmanarkham or r/letgirlshavefun.
Plus there are plenty of communities that are all but abandoned.
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People forget that user experience isn't just the stuff on the screen you interact with. There is a governance piece that is lacking in a lot of instances, and in the open source community as a whole. A lot of the successful projects out there are backed by some kind of foundation.
Take a look at the latest Hexbear drama. Some person out there owned the domain for their instance and let it expire. Now they are in a bidding war with a crypto site with a hexagon-related name. If they had formed some kind of organization or entity that registered the domain and owned the instance, this probably wouldn't have happened. Their users wouldn't get redirected to a domain auction site when trying to access the site. That's not an ideal user experience. It destroys trust.
SDF being a 501(c)(7) is one of the reasons that it's my home instance. For me, it provides a level of trust that an instance run by some random person on the internet doesn't. If there is a big federation/defederation debate, then it's really up to the membership to decide, and not a collection of admins or a single person getting the vibe of the users.
Another thing to remember is that Lemmy really shouldn't be competing against Reddit. The purpose of Reddit is to have the user generate content in order to keep the user's attention on the site so they can sell targeted advertisements. This is the basic business model for all of commercial social media. It has nothing to do with creating communities. That is secondary. If you want more people on Lemmy so that there is more content for you to consume, just stay on Reddit or TikTok. They need to sell ads in order to fund model training to keep your engagement up in order to sell more ads in order to provide quarterly growth to their shareholders. If you want more people on Lemmy because more brains mean better communities, then focus the communities.
The real opportunity for the fediverse is getting a lot of the existing non-profits, social organizations, and other types of communities to set up their own instances. This answers the “what instance do I join?” question by joining the instance associated with the community you're already involved in. Another reason I'm on SDF is retro computing. If you're really into your local makerspace, then you probably have a community ready to go for a Lemmy instance. If you're involved in your HOA and you all have a Facebook page or are all over Nextdoor, maybe set up a Lemmy instance. In all these cases, the organizational infrastructure is there for the administrative stuff like getting a domain and paying for hosting.
Also, I'm old enough to remember that Facebook took off when everyone's parents started joining. Imagine if the AARP rolled out a Lemmy instance. They are big enough put some serious money into development. You would probably get a lot of accessibility improvements.
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I picked world cuz it was by far the biggest at the time
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This is basically the solution. Just give a few words to explain that different servers can have some rules differences and offer the easy join button.
Get people onboarded fast and easy! If they want to, they can learn more afterwards.
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What the federse needs is an app that makes the concept intuitive. I've been toying with an idea and how to monetize it, but I have no knowledge on how to actually make it
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I guess so. Every Lemmy app I've used also offers similar views.
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Pre-emptive defederation
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Well, one of the reasons why I used 3rd party apps to begin with was because the mobile Reddit app was an unoptimized buggy mess for me, which often overheated my phone.
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I agree with you, but at the same time if there aren't enough users, small and niche sublemmys will never grow and have enough content to be interesting.
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I miss those times when you actually had to learn a lot of things before being able to write stuff on the internet.
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That's easily fixable by using a third-party app such as Voyager (or on the web on wefwef.app)
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If you're not a native English speaker, you could try joining an instance that speaks your language, for example.
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Doing a 1/1 recreation of niche communities from reddit is a fools errand. Let communities develop on their own, or even better, simply federate existing communities.
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Once upon a time Reddit used to be just a single subreddit. And it was fine. Lemmy already has enough users for separate subreddits to be actually kinda viable, even if they are not too active.
We'll be fine.
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Lemmy is too right wing to serve as a good Reddit replacement. The queer communities on Reddit don't want to move here because their members will be harassed.
