Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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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 that if you join any Lemmy instance (e.g. Marxist-Leninist instance of Lemmy (not Hexbear)) and if you ignore some stuff on the instance, then it's a pretty compelling experience.
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Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it 'wars'.
As for UX, there's definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstancethout explicitly subbing to them all.
But I don't think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.
The only real federation dramas I can think of were relating to Hexbear and Beehaw. If Greenleaf was on one of those instances then maybe it could explain their skewed perspective. Otherwise yeah, I don't get it.
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This seems to be quite a problem here, too many techy people and too few people with other interests, sure I'm in the first group myself but even then this is still a problem
Valid point
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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?
For me, a major issue isn't even the UI. It's federation control. On Mastodon & co, I can mute entire instances, cutting out A LOT of bullshit. On Lemmy, if I want that kind of control, I need to run my own instance. Doable, but kinda overkill.
It's one thing to hide individual subreddits on a centralised platform. It's another thing entirely to have many sites building a big platform, with the same communities duplicated with different rules and followings. That's just a game of wack-a-mole at that point.
And if I don't like the instance's communities, chances are I don't want to interact with its users either, leading to even more wack-a-mole.
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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 don't know, feddit.nl is pretty chill. I always see everything and barely anything objectable
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For me, a major issue isn't even the UI. It's federation control. On Mastodon & co, I can mute entire instances, cutting out A LOT of bullshit. On Lemmy, if I want that kind of control, I need to run my own instance. Doable, but kinda overkill.
It's one thing to hide individual subreddits on a centralised platform. It's another thing entirely to have many sites building a big platform, with the same communities duplicated with different rules and followings. That's just a game of wack-a-mole at that point.
And if I don't like the instance's communities, chances are I don't want to interact with its users either, leading to even more wack-a-mole.
https://piefed.social/ has user-level instance muting similar to Mastodon
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The vast majority of users don't like the old.reddit view, else reddit would have that as default.
I have friends who still only use old.reddit and refuse to switch to new UI.
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The vast majority of users don't like the old.reddit view, else reddit would have that as default.
It was the default for a very long time. Reddit changed that because it prevented them from monetizing the site that easily. And the admins seemed to dislike what RES could do with the old Reddit look.
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I have friends who still only use old.reddit and refuse to switch to new UI.
Would they be interested in Lemmy? Them using old.reddit shows that they would probably like it here
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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?
The UI isn't the problem? The attached screenshot shows people talking about federation. Federation is very confusing, but also the core part of how the Fediverse functions. The only thing you could to is to provide an entry portal, where all servers are categorized by the type of content they provide and you can check and uncheck the type of content you want or might want to interact with. Based on your choices, the portal could recommend a random Lemmy or Mbin instance that has a track record of being reliable and allows you to interact with most content of that type. So if you'd want to see porn for example, the portal should choose an instance that is federated with lemmynsfw.
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I have friends who still only use old.reddit and refuse to switch to new UI.
How old are those friends of yours?
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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 switched to Mbin but Lemmy has a variety of interfaces, not so sure this is necessarily a UX issue but an understanding issue.
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We already have good information, the barrier to entry just needs to be lowered
I respectfully disagree. Reddit went downhill and significantly more difficult to manage/moderate when the masses joined.
If people aren't willing to invest a bit of time to understand how Lemmy works (and it's really not that difficult to understand), then I don't think Lemmy is a good fit for them.
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The UI isn't the problem? The attached screenshot shows people talking about federation. Federation is very confusing, but also the core part of how the Fediverse functions. The only thing you could to is to provide an entry portal, where all servers are categorized by the type of content they provide and you can check and uncheck the type of content you want or might want to interact with. Based on your choices, the portal could recommend a random Lemmy or Mbin instance that has a track record of being reliable and allows you to interact with most content of that type. So if you'd want to see porn for example, the portal should choose an instance that is federated with lemmynsfw.
The UI is fine, you can use Photon or other modern UI's
The UX is the problem (User Experience), the defaults just suck and many will give up before even knowing better UI's exist, or finding the right settings to make the default UI work for them.
Just picking a instance is intimidating and many will give up before that, we should guide them to pick an instance or choose a default and give them the option to change.
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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?
The vast majority of people want an experience where federation is invisible. Sign up and post/comment. To maintain the benefits of decentralisation and choice, that's never going to be a truly workable thing.
The vast majority of people don't want to create or even participate in communities, they just want to lurk, scroll and get their new content fix. Every social media based site I've ever been on, federated or centralised has a large group of people complaining about the lack of new content but never take it upon themselves to apply the obvious solution themselves.
These are not necessarily UX issues, these are people issues.
Maybe its time to stop continually worrying about this subject and concentrate on creating great communities? Because if we do that then users will participate organically.
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I switched to Mbin but Lemmy has a variety of interfaces, not so sure this is necessarily a UX issue but an understanding issue.
That is a UX issue.
UX is like a Joke, if you need to explain it to someone, it's a bad Joke/UX
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I respectfully disagree. Reddit went downhill and significantly more difficult to manage/moderate when the masses joined.
If people aren't willing to invest a bit of time to understand how Lemmy works (and it's really not that difficult to understand), then I don't think Lemmy is a good fit for them.
Having a barrier to entry just filters out non tech savvy people, and creates a bubble.
We want all kinds of people on Lemmy, not just 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?
it feels like old reddit
Wait, when did that become a bad thing? I exclusively browsed old.reddit.com because the new layout is a fucking abomination.
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The vast majority of people want an experience where federation is invisible. Sign up and post/comment. To maintain the benefits of decentralisation and choice, that's never going to be a truly workable thing.
The vast majority of people don't want to create or even participate in communities, they just want to lurk, scroll and get their new content fix. Every social media based site I've ever been on, federated or centralised has a large group of people complaining about the lack of new content but never take it upon themselves to apply the obvious solution themselves.
These are not necessarily UX issues, these are people issues.
Maybe its time to stop continually worrying about this subject and concentrate on creating great communities? Because if we do that then users will participate organically.
We should do both.
Give people a good UX, and build solid communities.
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The vast majority of users don't like the old.reddit view, else reddit would have that as default.
Are you suggesting that businesses only change things based on what their users want? Because that's obviously nonsense. Enshitification finds a way regardless of what the consumer wants.
