Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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If they find Lemmy "too hard to understand", do we really want them here?
I do. Anything is better than the sites they are on currently. More different opinions can help a place grow.
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I think a big problem is a lot of the explainers for new users, at least the ones that were around back when I first joined Mastodon, were or are absolute dog shit. They were all existential explanations rather than practical ones. I was trying to figure out which instance to join, and why one might be better for me than another, and every explainer I saw was basically a variation on, "iT's JuSt LikE EmAiL. wHy Is tHaT hArD? sToP bEiNg So sTuPid, DuMmY." None of them really explained the user experience, and how different instances might affect it, let alone the existence of the local and global feeds and how your instance choice affects those. It was like asking someone how to use chopsticks and them telling you, "It's easy. Just put food in your mouth with them. Works just like a fork."
Technically true, but it omits some pretty crucial information.
Once you're into it and have the lay of the land, it seems really simple in retrospect. But if you're coming in cold with no idea how any of it works, and the only help you get is some dickhead shouting, "EmAiL! iT's LiKe EmAiL!" then the learning curve seems a lot steeper than it actually is.
True but they've improved dramatically - especially what Blaze is telling people now in r/RedditAlternatives. (it's sth like 5 sentences now, only what they need to know - see it live here)
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If it helps, the issue is much less prominent for PieFed. Pick https://piefed.social/ bc it is the flagship and new features will just magically appear every week or so (not joking! the pace of development really is that fast!) Also it's easier to not have to start the community joining process for every community - that one being (by far) the largest for PieFed means that more often than any other instance, that work will have been done for you.
Also, when you join, you will become energized about the Fediverse again - the startup wizard helping you pick communities to subscribe to based off of your interests will make you happy:-). Whether it's worth the pain of learning a whole new system after that or not... is up to you, but seriously if you need that jolt of positivity, sign up TODAY! (you can always abandon it tomorrow, though I hope you won't, and am betting that actively seeing it in front of you may help... although tbf there is a bit of a learning curve as you adjust, and yet only bc there's so much MORE you can do with PieFed, like Lemmy has just Subscribed vs. All, whereas PieFed has a whole slew of new options to add to that, in the Topics, in choosing to receive Notifications for content rather than have to navigate to it, and new stuff is coming like personalized multi-communitied as well - it kinda really is awesome and exciting!?
)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. -
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?
So my understanding from reading this (and other threads on Lemmy) is that:
-A majority of Lemmy users would rather the userbase remained small (in comparison to corporate social media and even compared to Mastodon).
-And a small but vocal minority wants to grow Lemmy to the point of being at least one of the choices, if not the de facto preferred alternative, on the mind of most Redditors who are sick of Reddit.
Is that accurate?
edit: formatting
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The problem with that is there is no centralized website you go to for Lemmy. The closest thing to that would be the various apps you use for Lemmy so my question would be where would you put this quiz? I think when people talk about joining a server being hard it's just hard for people used to a centralized social media to get used to the idea that one social media platform can be made up of a bunch of different websites and it becomes overwhelming to even figure out where to go. They're very used to just going to reddit's website so if they can't just look up Lemmy and click the first link to join it's gonna be too complex.
Just go to https://discuss.online, easy.
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A lot of disingenuous Lemmy users in that thread pretending that picking a server is more confusing than filing your taxes. I think join-lemmy should probably hot-list like 6 or 7 servers instead of making you choose via a primary interest, since you can migrate your account later anyway. But I am personally not tech oriented and managed to make an account and find an app without an issue.
I know this might hurt to read but the average reddit user probably is someone who doesn't know how email works.
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It's also less likely to happen now. Back when that happened, users didn't have the ability to block instances and so it was up to the admins to do that for everyone.
It's now possible to block instances at the user level
Not really though - that only mutes communities, while the users are still free to troll you by replying and generating notifications in posts sent to other communities.
Worse, that protection has even weakened rather than strengthened over time - the notifications used to be blocked. I almost decided to leave Lemmy myself when I continued to receive notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after accidentally responding to a post that I encountered in All - I hadn't read the sidebar, I didn't know about that instance, and so how was I supposed to know!?
I did that in Lemmygrad, and then again in [email protected] - and after that, I very much understand why people say that we are miserable tankie trolls over here.
It's the Nazi bar effect: "We" might be fine, but there are places here that anyone can just wander into without any advanced notice of what will happen...and then they leave. And complain over in r/RedditAlternatives, warning others against attempting the same.
And since it's TRUE, we DESERVE this reputation. 100% of the people I've ever mentioned Lemmy to have outright chided me for having mentioned it. I can see why, with such bOtH sIdEs SaMe content as this:
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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?
because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
No, it isn't.
The UX is fine. It's clean, fast, and functional. Anyone who is too fancy for "old Reddit" can stay on new Reddit with the bots and Xers. They'd just come over and be nothing but insufferable anyway.
o.oMultiple front ends and themes are available. In the end, we're here for the conversation, not fancy graphics, sounds, or CSS trash.
If someone can't get past picking a server or simple graphics, the likelyhood of them being any benefit here is minimal. The more is not always the merrier.
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How old are you, out of interest? Your posts in your similar thread about default viewing experience makes it seem like you want an Instagram-style image browser rather than the link aggregator which Reddit and Lemmy actually are.
Isn't the "tiling" view on PieFed like that? Link
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I think it will probably address a few of the issues you have with Lemmy, and then you will join the piefed enthusiasts like @[email protected] @[email protected]
Absolutely. Case in point: I got a notification now when you tagged me, while a month or possibly even a week ago I would not have. There's new features weekly here!:-D
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- Stop making blanket claims about instances you like or dislike, no matter how fair you feel they may be, and don't fall for the bait of others doing it. This is just drama and is exhausting to read about.
- Instead of suggesting people "join Lemmy", say things like "Join Lemmy at programming.dev" (or whatever instance you yourself are using). Sure, "but picking a server is hard" will always probably be a complaint, but leading with the one you personally use is the best way around it. If you're on a hobby focused instance (like I am) then maybe suggest a generic instance to people outside of your hobby. Don't be afraid to suggest lemmy.world. It's better to suggest the biggest instance than endlessly debate about which one is the best to suggest.
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This is fantastic thank you, I've created an account. I like the onboarding
Sadly there are some aspects that don't work well - like searching and notifications sometimes sends you to things that don't exist. This is MORE than made up for (imho at least, though I respect that it won't be everyone's) in having so many features that Lemmy still lacks.
The onboarding process is one fantastic one, and you've barely begun to learn all that you can now do that you could not before. Categories of Communities, hashtags, notifications for every. single. thing. (whole entire communities? best used only for your favorites or low frequency ones - though a new custom Topics feature will make that process obsolete, whenever it comes out, I don't know the prioritization. Comment in [email protected] or [email protected] if you want to add new feature requests:-)
I would keep your old account around though, for the handful of things that PieFed isn't fully ready to deliver yet.
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I use Boost for Lemmy. The transition from Reddit was easy for me, and I know little about the fediverse other than the most basic outlines.
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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.US politics (WAY TOO MUCH)
Piefed has built in keywords filters, that can help
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Exactly it seems most people here still didn't realize that this is an open source project run by volunteers, not a corporation with countless employees and a profit motive. If people want something to get done then it's best they start doing it themselves.
There's been a few of those posts lately, the next one I'm probably going to suggest the OP to improve the onboarding themselves
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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
I can browse the All feed but not much interests me there. I’ve found a few on my instance and stumbled upon some from other instances via links in posts but if I find a community on something like the website you posted I have no idea how to get there and subscribe to the community. I try to paste the link into the search but that just treats it like a keyword to search my instance.
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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?
lol lol
- Reddit sucks
- I can’t be expected to make a decision
- I’ll stick with reddit
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Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media
Lemmy is a protocol for networking individual privately hosted social media instances. It is not a panacea for corporate control of social media infrastructure. You're still hosting these sites on AWS / Azure / some other large corporately controlled private hardware setup. You're still securing the URL from a private DNS. You're still paying for these sites out of the surplus of a handful of wealth(ier) patrons and their friendly donors (or ending up like Hexbear.net, with a domain name up for grabs because it was mismanaged by part time broke amateurs).
Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.
There's not a lot we can do about it individually. I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP's image's "this is too weird and scary" attitude.
If popping into the Fediverse and just picking a Lemmy instance was as straightforward as selecting "Communities I'm interested in" on other bigger social media feeds, the onboarding would be smoother. But if you poke around and see people going whole hog frothing at the mouth "Everyone on <instance>.<whatever> is morally degenerate and has ruined the community at large!!!" reactionary in between instances, that's an immediate turn off that I don't think anyone within the Lemmy network knows how to deal with.
Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit, just ported into a more decentralized network. And it neglects the fundamentals of modern web hosting (we're all at the mercy of the IANA / Cloudflare, etc / the major hosting companies).
Lemmy is, itself, a shortsighted patch on a much larger and scarier problem. The instance infighting only reveals how shortsighted.
First off, there's nothing we can do about moving away from larger hosting Corporations, not with the technology we currently have. If we want to reach a national or international audience, we need infrastructure, and that has to come from somewhere; a business model makes sense. If you're hosting to a small community, you'd be able to get away with 1 selfhost, but to scale you'd need redundancies and bandwidth. The best choice we can make is the companies we would rather do business with. At this point, I'm definitely favoring Cloudflare and Azure (in that order) over AWS.
I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP’s image’s “this is too weird and scary” attitude.
I see this in a lot of comments about this so while I don't want to downplay the severity of this, I've personally never see instance in-fighting. Maybe it's the things I'm subscribed to, idk, but I usually visit both my local and all just to see what's going on. The Hexbear domain being sold is probably one of the first times I've run across discussions about other instances. Also, their domain being sold is lowkey hilarious. That was a problem as old as the internet (losing a domain). As we move to decentralization and privatization/ownership of data that's going to continue to be a thing I think.
Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit,
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the intra-channel fighting - is it just disagreeable people commenting, or is it like "This community is better than that" or "This instance is better than that"? I often see discussions on Reddit, arguing, bad faith actors, but I wouldn't classify that as in-channel-fighting. idk.
There’s not a lot we can do about it individually.
Complain. JoinLemmy is Open Source on Github. If you have ideas - share them. If you take a look through their issues and feel like adding in your 2 cents, go for it.
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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?
feels like old reddit
They obviously haven't visited https://old.lemmy.world/
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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.In addition to keyword filters that Blaze mentioned, PieFed is basically the only way I know of, other than an app (Sync or Connect) that offers a true instance filter that blocks all users from the specified instance, without requiring admin support. I've blocked all those batshit insane comments from lemmy.ml and now if I go to the same identical posts, those comments from those users from those instances that you specify are flat gone. Regardless of the community. More in this post but that's basically it that I've said already.
Likewise, Categories of Communities allows you to have your cake and (when you want it) eat it too. e.g. check out https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft and note absence of it, in that category. Likewise https://piefed.social/topic/fediverse, and https://piefed.social/topic/food, and https://piefed.social/topic/gaming, and so on. But, in the very rare event that you ARE wanting it (hey, it happens!) it's still accessible at https://piefed.social/topic/news (& politics).
I would be remiss if I did not tell you that PieFed isn't fully completed yet - it both has features that Lemmy (and even Reddit!) lacks, while also missing some, like its search feature is pretty abysmally bad (on purpose, it just hasn't been the top priority yet, to receive some love and attention:-). Though I still love it even so. You can keep your old account (to do things that PieFed cannot yet), and eventually you should find yourself using the new perhaps 90% of the time, as you adjust and come to love what it can do for you - though note that I find that the approach to finding content is quite different from when I used Lemmy, which only offers Subscribed vs. All, whereas PieFed has so many more options to choose from (it may be overwhelming at first - but it's so fantastic to have choices!:-).
