Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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I disagree that this is a concern. If you are already exaggerating about federation wars, chances are you already tried lemmy and know a good bit about selecting instances. The average user will not care as much as you do.
The average user will go to join-lemmy site, will not care at all about the different instances and likely choose the biggest one or first one they see. None of them will think "oh no this one is involved in federation wars" because thats not something you find out before knowing some about the fediverse.
Somehow most people figured out email. It's like picking Gmail, Outlook, Proton, Mailbox, Yahoo. Doesn't matter, pick the one you like, ceate as many accounts as you want, or make your own.
This isn't a Fediverse or Lemmy problem, but is speaks volumes of how broken the Internet has become and how far we've fallen.
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I'm an OG user and other than technical issues (most of which have been figured it by now) I prefered both the original redesign and the newest one (though I did like the previous one more, I think).
If you get used to the fact that it's just a bit different it's perfectly fine and actually looks better. Especially since it has dark mode.
I tried, but I like information density and the new UI is a horrible waste of space. I get why people like it and it's way more modern, I'm saying loads of people who used reddit from the start will probably never get used to the new UI, mostly because of the customizability and open API.
Reddit didn't have apps in the beginning, so we made them over the years perfecting the UI. I settled on baconreader with a compact view, but it and so many others died when the API was purged. I patched my app and can still use it to this day, but I don't because fuck them.
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Is there any way to set one up that protects the anonymity of the people involved (where even the organizers don't know each other's real names) for opsec purposes?
Do what rich people do and set up shell companies. There are law firms that specialize in this kind of thing.
But if that is a hard requirement is a Lemmy instance the right tool for the job? Wouldn't something on Tor be better?
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whatever, just make a lemmy app that defaults to lemmy.world i guess
Bad choice, many new users specifically came here because of [email protected], which can't be accessed from lemmy.world.
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I disagree that this is a concern. If you are already exaggerating about federation wars, chances are you already tried lemmy and know a good bit about selecting instances. The average user will not care as much as you do.
The average user will go to join-lemmy site, will not care at all about the different instances and likely choose the biggest one or first one they see. None of them will think "oh no this one is involved in federation wars" because thats not something you find out before knowing some about the fediverse.
The average user, me, will go to sign up, kinda briefly go to Wikipedia on fediverse, still not understand, and pick a random server, and then here I am trying to figure it out as I go
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Bad choice, many new users specifically came here because of [email protected], which can't be accessed from lemmy.world.
i would guess the piracy audience doesn't struggle with the same problems that would make a default instance useful
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The average user will go to join Lemmy and abort, because they can't grasp the idea that joining one server gets them into other servers. They worry about server selection, have analysis paralysis, and nope out. That's why they're asking for a bluesky reddit and not a mastodon reddit.
Normie's want centralization because they don't understand how else it can work and while some can learn and have it explained many will give up before giving it a chance.
That's about how it worked for me when I first tried giving it a go about a year ago. Wasn't until today when I saw that Reddit post talking about paywalling some subs that I decided to give it another go.
In fact that post had a pretty decent write up of how to set up Lemmy and what it was. Probably the only reason I managed to kinda figure it out.
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endless wars of who's federeated with who
i've been here for months and months, i might have seen this mentioned as an aside once or twice. but "endless wars"?
I frequently see comments saying stuff like ādonāt trust them, theyāre from Lemmy.mlā or āIām glad Hexbear defederatedā usually in terms of tankies/pro-russia anti-Ukraine support. Or occasionally, a random dislike of Lemmy.world because itās too much like Reddit (isnāt that the point?)
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@[email protected] commented above with a good experience of why it's a crappy idea (I was thinking a randomzier would be good too.
I just clicked the first option it showed, which (for me) was a non-English instance. The second option was that LGBT-focused instance that defederated with lemmy.world a few months ago. Of course I didnāt know anything about either community so I just picked randomly.
I could see that happening a lot. I've messed with other randomizing systems and sometimes you forget how many niche or non matching picks can pop up when you really look at it. Even a 10% match with language barriers wouldn't be good for a reliable system of placement.
I also don't like the "what harry potter house" do you belong to quiz stuff or anything that asks to crawl or input your data (no thank you). Definitely more complicated than I thought.
Oh, yeah, I can see why uniform randomness would be a problem. I thought the criticism was directed at "Just sort people into a Lemmy server either based off their interests or location"
I was thinking that you do a little questionnaire and it gives you the best matching server.
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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?
Even worse, the Tankies are basically running the landing page that asks them which instance to join.
We should probably make a non-tankie version and get it trending for the Algorithm.
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Reading these comments I feel a sense of dread. You are all experiencing survivor bias. Initially when I ran into barriers I gave up for like a year before bothering to try Lemmy again.
If you don't want Lemmy to serve as an actual counter to corporate controlled social media if it means letting in "normies" then you are content with corporate controlled social media continuing to dominate our lives. Which sounds about right for humanity. The smugness is vile.
Just bring on the vacuum decay event already.
While humanity can be incredible and beautiful to look at from a distance...
Humans, tend to fucking suck. -
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?
The problem is content, there isn't any. Either I select all -> hot and see new content that almost feels like /r/subreddit_name/new or I select all -> active and while those have engagement, its all very old content, like a day old, two days old, etc. And then the other problem is that I only see two types of content usually: Either articles or screenshots from social media. Nothing else.
I just think that unless there's a sudden influx of users for whatever reason, lemmy will never pick up. We just need more and more people, but have no way of getting them, not to mention so many communities just choosing not to migrate off Reddit, especially huge sports communities.
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First of all, 99% of people don't have the technical expertise to self host Lemmy, and that's who we are talking about in this thread.
Secondly, there are very significant benefits to using a well established server versus self hosting.
The most obvious perk is having a built-in community to interact with and learn from.But more importantly, more established servers will already be subscribed to many of the major communities, making the task of finding and browsing remote communities that much easier. Consider this:
Your local version of c/science_memes only has ~200 posts and 1.2k comments. Also, many of the older posts didn't seem to federate the comments or upvotes. This is because your server only recently subscribed to that community, and federation doesn't occur retroactively.
The sh.itjust.works version of the community has 3.9k posts and 94k comments, because we have been subscribed since the community started.
The main version actually has 3.92k posts and 99.6k comments. Most of the missing comments on the SJW version are likely from lemmygrad and hexbear users, who are defederated by SJW but not by mander.xyz. This is also another major consideration about self hosting vs. joining a larger server: defederations. Some people will see predetermined defederations as a pro while others will consider it a con (also depending on which servers are defederated). The main thing is that people have options that work for them.
Funnily enough, the communick version is majorly fucked up, not sure why that is.
At this point I'm just getting curious, so I checked the lemmy.myserv.one version as well, and it's got an impressive 3.84k posts and 98.2k comments.
Might as well try it for c/greentext as well.
- Main community - 1.22k posts / 52.6k comments
- is.hardlywork.ing version - 501 posts / 901 comments
- communick.news version - 1.1k posts / 23k comments
- lemmy.myserv.one - 200 posts / 15 comments (I guess I never subscribed to that community on this account? Kinda weird)
- mander.xyz - 1.22k posts / 52.9k comments (not sure how it has more comments than the main version, someone should look into that)
So yeah, it's not quite as simple as you make it seem. Hopefully someday Lemmy will integrate the ability to federate communities retroactively as some kind of option. Because I think that was more of a design choice than anything, technically it should be possible to toggle a setting and get your instance to download all of the posts and comments from a remote community, even from before you subscribed.
And I feel like without having access to all of the old posts and comments that we have built up over the past couple years, content on Lemmy probably feels a lot more sparse for a new user. Personally, I have always enjoyed sorting by top posts of all time in various communities, both on reddit and now on Lemmy. Even if you've been subscribed to the community the whole time, you tend to miss out on some great posts if you only ever sort by new or hot.
And btw, I luckily have a free lifetime subscription to the communick Lemmy server because they did a promotion back in the day.
I gave up on the technical expertise part, thats why I use yunohost lol, and I defintiely went overkill with the 8core16gb for two apps that only im using, yeah its an issue you dont grab old posts, it shouldnt take up too much memory for text at least considering wikipedia can be downloaded for 58gb uncompressed
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I really really doubt the part about the content based on my interests part, I've tried Lemmy, Mastodon and Pixelfed, none of the has any content that I care about enough to join a community but they have way too much US politics (WAY TOO MUCH), so it really doesn't encourages me to try anything new on the fediverse (like Loops, picking an instance, creating user just to find no content for me?).
I'd like to know how good or bad the instance block works on PieFed, because here on lemmy I still see hexbear posts that other users crosspost, even when my instance already defederated that instance.Im trying to post more to comicbooks and other communities i like so others think its active and post there lol
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And then different servers even have different options so you're not stuck with one person's view of what things look like.
I was kind of upset that Kbin went under, lots of cool features, same data.
It got forked as mbin tho at least
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The problem is content, there isn't any. Either I select all -> hot and see new content that almost feels like /r/subreddit_name/new or I select all -> active and while those have engagement, its all very old content, like a day old, two days old, etc. And then the other problem is that I only see two types of content usually: Either articles or screenshots from social media. Nothing else.
I just think that unless there's a sudden influx of users for whatever reason, lemmy will never pick up. We just need more and more people, but have no way of getting them, not to mention so many communities just choosing not to migrate off Reddit, especially huge sports communities.
- [email protected] can help
- "Top Day / 12 hours/ 6 hours" works better than Hot
- "New comments " works better than Active
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For the majority of commenters: UX is not UI.
The poor UX experience is the research a person has to do before they can even participate. You need to have a basic understanding of how the network works, and then you have to shop around for a server.
Itās enough friction to prevent people from on-boarding and thatās not good for a platform that needs people to be valuable.
That's what I send to people:
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
What research is needed?
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You've been toying with the idea of making money off an app often, let me guess?
A bit. Why?
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Iām so sick of this dumb ass argumentā¦
The server question was 100% the reason I didn't join Lemmy right away. It's not that I didn't understand what a server is. It's that the signup form was asking me to make a decision I didn't know the answer to, so I gave up.
With a little more hand holding, I'd have joined months before I actually did.
Well, that's fair enough, I guess.
I think the difference between servers and what it means to be on one server vs another is not exactly obvious. On the other hand, if picking a Mastodon or Lemmy server gives a person choice paralysis, I don't know how they can pick anything in life without getting choice paralysis.
Like, how do you know which bread to buy? I guess you just arbitrarily pick one and if you like it then just stick with it, and if you don't then you try something else.
But listen, I'm no stranger to overthinking things, so I guess I do get it, even if it is a bit frustrating as someone who wants people to take the internet back from corporations and oligarchs. Sorry for being a bit overly dismissive. I think it's just that I'm a bit of an old school guy, and so I mostly just hate the idea that the entire internet needs to be centralized around one website/app/platform and that any small degree of choice or distribution is a bad thing.
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It's not empathetic. It just tries to understand human psychology well enough to manipulate consumer choices for more profits. If you want something on that philosophy, that's what reddit is already for.
I'm not trying to say that marketing is empathetic. I'm saying that meeting people where they are at is.
