Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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I found a beautiful web client for Lemmy that I wish was the default experience. It would surely help Lemmy in gaining popularity.
here's the link: https://phtn.app/
This I like, it solved many of the issues. I wish it was the default.
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The fediverse being "endless wars about who is federated" is not really true, is it?
Sure not everyone is federated with everyone else, but legacy social media is federated with nobody at all. Federation is the entire point of the Fediverse, you connect with people you want to connect with and you don't connect with people you don't. It's as simple as that.
Plus, do people really want to be on a single platform with everyone else in the world?
Because that's a big part of what broke the internet in the first place...99% of users are going to check out when you ask them what server to join.
I'm so sick of this dumb ass argument...
People who complain about "servers" need to tell me what they think "the internet" is. The existence of servers didn't stop online video games, email or discord/slack from catching on with hundreds of millions of people, so why is it suddenly a problem when it comes to the Fediverse?
Onboarding obviously needs to be better, but I'm going to be totally honest honest here: I don't think these are legitimate, actionable or useful critiques.
These are merely excuses from people who are addicted to legacy social media and who don't give a shit that the internet is owned and controlled by a few rich corporations.
Well ot kinda was true for the time of the big reddit exodus, there were very active and massively upvoted threads about one instance defederating from another, instances debating on whether they should defederate, beehive publicly wondering whether to ditch lemmy etc
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TBH, if you can't handle picking a server, please just stay away.
The reality is this filters out all non tech savvy people.
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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?
Tell them to download the thunder app (it's very similar to many of the popular reddit apps) and just give them a list of the 10 most popular fediverse's to pick from to make an account.
I mentioned this like a year ago. Users will need their hands held to get them to easily come over.
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Haha that’s very true. Same concept as signing up for a specific email provider. Hadn’t really thought of that.
It's literally in the "Introduction" to lemmy (third paragraph):
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Have you ever been on Facebook? Ever read the illiterate moronic uneducated garbage that people post as fact? It's called 'my truth'; maybe because it's only true in their sphere (of one).
There are going to be a seriously large number of people totally flummoxed by that question.
If selecting a server is too much, then directing them to a random on that fits their criteria should solve the problem. Which joinlemmy, joinmastodon, joinoixelfed, and so on do.
If even that is too much, then I'm totally fine without those people as I question what kind of stuff they'll be saying.
And this isn't even elitist. It's not "you have to have the ActivityPub spec memorised" or even know what ActivityPub is. It's like "which email host should I pick". No deeper than that.
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.
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This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s
Strawman
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I think the most important part to understand with lemmy is that the choice of server doesn't matter that much because you can read and post on all the other servers as well. Unless you choose hexbear or whatever it is called these days.
But it really is a problem when people can't be bothered to choose from more than exactly one. I mean if you can make a selection from several different brands of toilet paper in a supermarket then why is it so hard to choose a server?
My point exactly. How do you function in life if choice is too much for you to comprehend? Maybe people just need a website called Lemmy.org that redirects them to a random approved server and that's it. "UX" problem solved.
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This, the survivor bias is absurdly high around lemmy.
This is my fourth instance because, for some reason, it's extremely hard to find an instance that defeds the 3 main propaganda instances, allows porn/hentai, piracy talk, weed and isn't too pissy about downvotes.Still I am thinking about leaving lemmy due to a complete lack of content for my country other than government propaganda... And I don't feel comfortable creating a community for the same reason and there doesn't seem to be anyone else from my country so... Nobody who cared about it (or who could help me mod).
I like how you put that. We really are the ones who survived
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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?
Gonna don my tinfoil hat here for a second...
Was the monetization of the API a deliberate move to kick out the progressive and tech-literate long-time reddit users (myself included, with 16 year badge and centuryclub), to in turn make the site more of a Nazi, pro-Trump circle jerk?
Because I really think it succeeded. The whole atmosphere shifted that day, and I've barely been back except when I end up there out of muscle memory or a Google result...and those often have the best answers removed by someone who went through and scrubbed their account.
We all remember how Spez treated r/thedonald, right?
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I found a beautiful web client for Lemmy that I wish was the default experience. It would surely help Lemmy in gaining popularity.
here's the link: https://phtn.app/
something in the same direction can be found under https://blorpblorp.xyz/
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Well ot kinda was true for the time of the big reddit exodus, there were very active and massively upvoted threads about one instance defederating from another, instances debating on whether they should defederate, beehive publicly wondering whether to ditch lemmy etc
Indeed, but by now everything seems more or less stable.
There might be a future event when instances decide to defederate lemmy.ml, making effective that there is actually two large spheres in Lemmy
- .ml, lemmygrad, hexbear (whatever their future name is)
- LW, SJW, feddit.org, Blahaj, lemmy.zip, sopuli, discuss.online etc.
Some instances want to stay connected to both (lemm.ee, lemmy.today, SDF), but they're not that many
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Wait wait wait... This implies people like new reddit... That shit makes my eyes bleed wtf
I like new reddit. It works well, I just wish I could keep it the same as it is. I HATE Lemmy desktop UI and nearly went back to Reddit because of it. Voyager for mobile and photon for desktop. Honestly photon for both might be better but I'm apparently the 1% of people on Lemmy that actually prefer an app over a website
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The transition to what? Why am i using piefed?
You mentioned that Lemmy was insufferable, so I offered an alternative.
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The reddit concept of subreddits also doesn't work well with federation IMO (at least no Lemmy's implementation).
Want to talk about video games? Well, there's no /r/games, instead there are bunch of different /c/games on different servers with varying amounts of activity. You basically gotta make the "pick a server" decision again whenever you post something. If you make the wrong choice, your post might not get seen by anyone, and even if you post to the biggest sub, you'll be missing out on eyeballs from people on other servers who aren't subscribed to that instance for whatever reason.
For example, lemmy.ml/c/linux_gaming and lemmy.world/c/linux_gaming have around the same number of subscribers. Should I post to both? Maybe the same people subscribe to both, so that's pointless? Or maybe I'll miss out on a lot of discussion if I post only to one? There's no way for me to know.
For me, it makes Lemmy less useful than reddit for asking really niche questions and getting useful answers. For posting comments on whatever pops up in my feed though, it works great.
I don't have any good solutions to this, and I'm sure it has been considered already. When I first joined, I remembered seeing people bring this same issue up, but it doesn't seem like it went anywhere? (Or maybe it did?)
I think this is a wrong mindset, you are supposed to be posting for the community, for the members of that community, not to be seen and praised through all the instances because that's how we got to the problem of getting the same post repeated over and over by the same person/script in all.
Of course that's my old man way of thinking, things should be posted once and let it federate, if it didn't reach an instance someone else might post it there, no need to hold all the glory, karma is just a number on lemmy anyway.
Unless they are a seller, then I'd see a reason for them to be creating spam. -
What's there to understand? Does the average person understand that reddit consists of a frontend written in a frontend framework that compiles to HTML, CSS, and JS? Do they understand that HTTPS is used to make the request between the client and server on port 443? Do they know that the request is processed by a back end connecting to postgresql and redis or memcache for faster responses? That most assets are probably delivered by a CDN?
Probably not. And why should they? They don't need to understand how the fediverse works, nor do they have to understand how email works. All they need to do is select a server, create an account, and start interacting. Same as email.
There's no mystery. The fediverse isn't complicated unless you freak out and start realising that the entire internet is more complicated than the shiny, glossy thing on top of it - which doesn't need to be understood to have simple interactions with.
What’s there to understand?
Starting off way too obtuse and disconnected from reality to have a conversation. Later.
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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 personally love Alexandrite.app as a UX. I'm so used to it that I get confused when I follow a link and see a default Lemmy instance, lol.
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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?
but it feels like old reddit
Yes, and that's a good thing.
There are lots of Lemmy apps that display posts in different ways. If you want "bells and whistles", then find an app that gives you that.
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Not necessailly federation, but I've seen a lot of people prejudge commenters for what instance they're a part of, most commonly calling people from .ml or hexbear tankies just for being on .ml or hexbear. It gets old really quickly.
I don’t think that’s what the person on Reddit is referring to, but judging people by their choice of instance is dumb.
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There are a few .world posters who make two to three posts a day about how much they hate lemmygrad hexbear and .ml.
Well that’s just a waste of time really.
