Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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Nothing, this seems like a good thing, I don't want them here if they literally cannot even comprehend the concept of different servers, though somehow no one has this issue with discord even though it's dogshit, almost as if they just yearn for the corporate boot.
With discord, though, the "server" part is largely hidden from the user or at least transparent - that's the thing. It simplifies the same concept into something more tangible.
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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?
Endless wars about federations. Ha, so true. Along with switching to Linux and Privacy.
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The apps are kinda meh. I haven't found one that doesn't come with significant disadvantages yet, and I've tried FIVE.
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There's no recommendations feed. You see what you're subscribed to, or everything. No in-between. You can't see what you've subscribed to, and a few posts that the algorithm thinks you might like. People like to complain about the algorithm, but one reason it's so addictive is that it's useful.
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Notifications don't work in every app
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Just having a feed that behaves normally seems to be really hard to do for apps. Stop slowing me posts I've already scrolled past, and when I click home/pull down to refresh, I want new posts, not the same thing again that I've already scrolled past and ignored. Some apps have settings (that are somehow not on by default) to hide read posts and mark posts read on scroll, but I haven't tried an app where that works every time.
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There's no "main" app. Think about Reddit before the API fees. There used to be a default app. It had its issues, but most features worked out of the box, and most things were intuitive and normie-friendly. You could use that to get comfortable with the social network itself, and then eventually try other apps when something got too annoying.
Compare that with Lemmy. You want to try it, and you already have to deal with choice paralysis. A ton of apps on the website, with utterly unhelpful descriptions ("an open-source Lemmy client developed by so-and-so"; wow, exactly zero of those words help me pick) and a random order that doesn't even let me default to one most popular one.
Quite a few apps focus on niche UI features like swipe-based navigation while still not having the basics down right. I'm several months into having joined Lemmy and I still haven't found an app that feels somewhat right. That is a challenge not one of the other social networks has managed. Congrats, Lemmy. Impressive.
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Picking a server and signing up in general is complicated. And it's an impactful decision that you have NO tools to make so early, unless you start researching like it's school homework.
.world? That's popular but you'll be judged for having joined it, plus you lose access to the piracy community. .ml? Hope you like communists and DRAMA. And if you get it wrong, there's no intuitive and easy way to migrate. You clunkily export your settings and re-import them; the servers will NOT talk to each other. And even then you lose some stuff.
This UX issue is tough. I don't have an easy solution. But I'm sure a UX expert could find one.
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Manual validation of your sign-up by a human. What is this, a Facebook group? If you introduce a 24-hour delay so early in the process, of course people are going to fall off.
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The mouse logo is kinda ugly, won't lie. I'm sure it's a more potent people repellent than you think.
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There is a LOT of tribalism. On Reddit, there's r/Canada, that's full of convinced conservatives that won't hesitate to artificially skew the discourse. And there's r/OnGuardForThee, basically the same but with progressives angry at the conservatives.
On Lemmy, that feels like the rule, not the exception. I just joined communities based on my interests, and my feed is full of communist vs communist vs non-communist drama. Can we frickin' chill?
If I need to start filtering out whole fields of interest that were taken over, joining less popular community clones or literally defederating instances to get a good experience, we've got it wrong. Normal people don't wanna do that when they literally just got here. They'll just leave.
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Somehow even more US-centric than Reddit. So... Much... American politics.
About the lack of an algorithm: do we really want to recreate the addictiveness of for-profit platforms? Is that actually a healthy feature? Perhaps it's better for society if our social media isn't as addictive as possible.
And on manual validation for sign-ups: before the mass migration from Reddit, most instances didn't seem to have validation, and then as it became popular, we got hit with trolls mass creating accounts posting CP and racist images, making it a game of whack-a-mole to stop it. As Lemmy is all volunteer run, we don't have paid content moderators always watching for that stuff, nor did they have an automated content filter. The main solution is to validate sign-ups so that the moderators and admins are not overwhelmed with spam.
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Ah, I see what you're saying. Under normal circumstances, I would suggest to new users to signup on the "flagship instance", but in Lemmy's case… nah.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not certain what content I'm not seeing because, well, I haven't seen it
. Some instances seem to do a good job of only blocking content from notoriously bad sources.AFAIK, you're able to see pretty much everything on your instance, but Beehaw did defederate from your instance, so think you can see their posts, but they can't see yours.
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I wasn't gonna say anything but that's another issue with the userbase on Lemmy.
It's occupied by a lot of people who think they are better and smarter than everyone else. Not that reddit didn't also have that problem but the smugness levels are definitely way higher around these parts.
Yeah i have a comp sci degree and it took me a minute to understand the different servers and how to curate my feed and then balance quality vs quantity of posts.
Im capable of understanding but i dont want to put effort into my leisure app, and it seems like nobody else does either.
Good starting defaults for instances and the "everything" front page seems most important. Maybe training people on the front page to branch out by showing them posts from up and coming communities..
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I'm sure it'll go away with time, hopefully as more people join and contribute.
I don't know if I would say itll "go away" with time. More like it will get diluted over time as more people join with varying stances on things.
See I am smarter and better than you so I know this to be the truth.
/s
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If coding were something I could do, I'd be tempted to run a modified lemmy instance where voting is disabled all together, and default sorting is forum style.
Edit: oh and nested replies would be disabled too. Maybe add a quote button on people's comments.
Voting being disabled is an option built into Lemmy that the admins can activate, though only a few choose to. I know Blaja disabled down votes but not upvotes.
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Could have auto versus manual server choice. Can always maintain option for granular selection, but "normies" could walk into a quiz when migrating?
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Top three things you used Reddit for? (List of maybe 10+ things, servers can maintain their feature list to empower this)
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Do you like A) talking to everybody about days topics B) talking to a smaller group of like minded people
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Do you like A) a MORE moderated space B) a LESS moderated space, realizing you may see more spam and controversy
And then calculates a server that meets needs, if multiple, then random number generator to assign a server. On user side, all they see is a quiz followed by a typical registration screen. This would help with distribution of users across niche servers, but feel lighter for user. They also would assume a more curated experience, regardless of where they end up. Servers could have to opt in to be fed users from search of they were afraid of impact on cost to maintain server.
The above likely aren't the right questions, but this framework could be effective
The lemmy servers could also provide how much headroom they have for extra users and the selection wouldn be weighed based on that so that smaller servers wont be overloaded and larger servers get enough users. They could implement some of this into the lemmy api itself.
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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.
That's a big reason I liked Lemmy.
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Endless wars about federations. Ha, so true. Along with switching to Linux and Privacy.
Are there endless wars? A lot of people don't like .ml, lemmygrad, and hexbear and they're defederated by a lot of instances, but that's not really a hot war. Outside of that most drama seems to be about certain mod/admin decisions. But that kind of feedback loop is by design. People are supposed to have opinions on whether they think instances are well run and aligns with what they're looking for...and if it doesn't align, that would be a good reason to switch instances. I see more fretting over how to make Lemmy more popular than arguments about instances.
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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'm all on board except for the comment about micro-penises. No one should ever resort to body-shaming.
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Somebody will have to host that. Whether it's a Lemmy app developer, or baked into the Lemmy codebase itself.
Baked in would be nicer. It would kind of cool for any landing page just kind of working to get you into the threadiverse. If I keep going to nomoreuserlemmy.org (or whatever fake one you want) it just redirects on the backend for me when I log in to an instance that actually works for me.
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Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
No. Too much attention here would be a bad thing with governments the world over leaning toward authoritarianism.
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Yeah i have a comp sci degree and it took me a minute to understand the different servers and how to curate my feed and then balance quality vs quantity of posts.
Im capable of understanding but i dont want to put effort into my leisure app, and it seems like nobody else does either.
Good starting defaults for instances and the "everything" front page seems most important. Maybe training people on the front page to branch out by showing them posts from up and coming communities..
Yeah and I completely agree with you, but look at the comments in this thread. So many people are coming off as elitists "why should we make things easier for stupid idiots we hate?".
Seems that many users here don't actually want anyone else joining unless they meet their arbitrary standards for intelligence or whatever.
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Isn't that just NodeBB?
I was looking at NodeBB as an option for that sort of thing. The problem there is it's not really structured for the kind of user-driven dynamic sub-community building that reddit and lemmy are built for.
But yes, that is essentially what I want, a traditional forum site with subreddits.
But then again, there's also the design of the posts themselves, and how they're shown on the user feed. Reddit clones put links and link access front and center, whereas there's more clicks involved in even accessing post content on a forum.
Overall I still think it'd be easier to forumize lemmy, than to lemmyize NodeBB. The latter would require too many additions and modifications, whereas the former can be done hypothetically with deletions only, well, and a few switched defaults.
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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?
Reddit being popular is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy.
When you get right down to it: people don't care that Reddit is selling their information, that the site itself is a piece of garbage, that running the site requires a bunch of no-life weirdos whose numbers will only increase going forward and whose power will likewise, or that the design actively encourages bots to the point of disincentivizing actual human beings from using it.
They want their memes, they want their news, they want their niche little interest subs and they want their porn. The simple fact is that lemmy is a smaller version of Reddit with fewer options and to the majority of people who don't care about their data or the objectively dogshit running of the site, there is no reason to cross over to Lemmy.
Until Reddit takes a Musk-type turn into being totally unuseable, lemmy will only see a trickle of users who are burned by Reddit.
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"Wah wah it's so hard to pick a server!"
JUST LIKE EMAIL YOU NITWIT!
JUST LIKE EMAIL YOU NITWIT!
We have very different perceptions of how people approach emails.
Guess how tech illiterates(?) approach email? They sign up on Gmail - perhaps with some handholding - and that's it. That's all they know or care about.
And before you say they don't deserve to be on the internet: they are all using Facebook, Youtube, Whatsapp, etc. Unless platforms like Lemmy actually treat new users better, there's not much incentive for people to switch.
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Voting being disabled is an option built into Lemmy that the admins can activate, though only a few choose to. I know Blaja disabled down votes but not upvotes.
Is that a consistent experience across lemmy though? I looked at some of those downvote-disabled instances, and then looked at posts in those instances from within an instance that still had downvotes enabled - and it appeared that people were still downvoting those posts just fine.
If it is possible to simply disable votes all together - including comment votes - I might try spending some time learning how to get that all setup and running and see how the experience is. But I would likely defederate from all vote-instances (or I don't know if there's a way to make the federation opt-in), so that community could be entirely free from voting effects.
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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?
we can redesign the on onboarding process.
stop explaining new terms
fuck infinite list of random names with anime girls (what do you want me to do,read!?)Make it like a map and turn instances into buildings (or gardens/circle/doesnt matter). Show some stats like how big, who i can talk to, topic. Gamify the experience so the fatigue turns into curiousity.
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Why is “drama” on Lemmy always highly exaggerated by people?
“Endless wars of who federates with who”. What is that person even talking about and who the fuck would even care as a normal user?
I haven't heard about any of that drama since the early days when things were still getting sorted out
