Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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Piefed asks this during onboarding: https://piefed.social/comment/4664996
They also have built-in keywords filter
This is fantastic thank you, I've created an account. I like the onboarding
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Uh yeah. I’ve got no clue how to find new communities? Instances? Groups? Whatever the hell the equivalent of a subreddit is called. It’s not user friendly at all.
What did people say when you posted and asked for help?
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Why not https://fedia.io/ ? It uses Mbin, the successor of Kbin
At this point I am lacking motivation to change. Why bother switching now?
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I’m on three different instances and the sort by All-hot feed is nearly identical.
I’m not on Beehaw or Hexbear, but those instances make it pretty well known they block a lot of other instances.
Some instances have very different rules on them that would affect your experience. Like not allowing downvotes, for example. Blahaj users can't see downvotes or downvote anything themselves.
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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’s why my less “tech savvy” friends won’t join. They don’t understand what federation is, and No they don’t want to take 2 minutes to learn.
It’s annoying, but it’s reality. People don’t understand the whole different servers thing, federation, and how to pick one.
I realize marketing isn’t a strong suit (nor should it be), but I’m proposing two solutions (well maybe not solutions, but something to help):
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A quick animated video showing the benefits of Lemmy and how this all works (if it hasn’t already been done yet)
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A service that basically simplifies and centralizes the signup process to one screen. During server selection, users can see the most populated servers and click on them to learn the specific rules for the server, etc.
Idk, maybe we already have all this…or this is just complicating the issue. Or maybe we only want people willing to take 2 minutes to learn about how it all works. Tbh that’s a pretty good natural filter for the types of users I want to be interacting and discussing with.
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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?
Why do we want more users? Because lemmy is insufferable. Im here, like many others, waiting for an alternative to reddit and hoping im already there.
No we dont need gatekeeping based on a users understanding federated servers. We need more people so the smaller communities actually have posts and we dont need to scroll the dumpster fire that is "everything".
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Exactly. If this minimal effort is keeping people out - GOOD. If you can't put the bare minimum effort in, then you'll just be another mindless TikTok type person and we really don't need those.
A counterargument to this is that a lot of people (who would put in the minimal effort) don't come here instead of Reddit because their niche community isn't represented well. So while it's nice to have higher effort/engagement members, you can't possibly cover all of what most people want to see without a lot of those.
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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 that's more of a feature, not a bug. It means if one group is doing a shitty job of running their community, it's easier to find another group of the same nature. I've noticed a lot of communities on .world are run a lot like the most popular subreddits where moderation of posts is highly aggressive, and seems aimed more at curating "high quality content" than actually being a community. Okay, easy enough, I just start posting to similar places on other instances, or start my own.
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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 going to be holding a teach-in about the fediverse. AFK I mean. Like the people I live with, and am in community with in meat space. They all want to ditch corpo social media, but aren’t sure how. I’ll hold a digital one too for my more extended community, but I want to start with the people I truly live with. I think word of mouth is a great way to onboard people as it allows for a dynamic level of handholding. This is essentially “grassroots” social media after all.
I don’t really want Reddit to join Lemmy en masse. I want the people that see the value of pre-2010 social media, and the “local” internet, to understand and have access to these tools and spaces. I think that will be best done through education, not advertising. Advertising the platform is exactly what all the platforms we want to ditch do, and we are actively trying to not be those platforms.
The sense of “needing” more users, to me at least, is a hold out of the “infinite growth”, capitalist, mindset. I don’t want infinite growth for my instance, I want the people it’s made for to find it, and enjoy communicating with the people they share it with.
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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 comments here are smug as fuck.
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Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media (which Reddit is). Without attracting new users Lemmy will almost certainly perish. It's goal should be a low bar to onboard new social media users coming from places like Reddit, Facebook, X.
Saying "Not our problem" is a woefully shortsighted.
If a small, one time pop-up designed to solve your problem makes you give up on solving your problem then you were never going to solve that problem.
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Why do we want more users? Because lemmy is insufferable. Im here, like many others, waiting for an alternative to reddit and hoping im already there.
No we dont need gatekeeping based on a users understanding federated servers. We need more people so the smaller communities actually have posts and we dont need to scroll the dumpster fire that is "everything".
Have you tried https://piefed.social/ ? Compatible with Lemmy (allows you to import your subscriptions list actually) and with a different approach: https://join.piefed.social/blog/
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The core issue is none of my hobbies exist on Lemmy. I tried really hard to populate those instances but there were just 3 (three) people engaging in discussions. What even is the point?
Three is better than none. as long as the community exist and has some kind of activity even one post a month with three comments, you are doing your part to create a viable home for those who share your niche interest. In three months you might get up to 6 people, in 9 months 10, one year later 15. Its difficult going from passive consumer to one of the few active posters but you truly are adding value to the space just by trying.
Lemmy users like to present lemmy vs reddit usage as all or nothing, its not. Realistically you still use reddit for the niche communities that arent getting much interaction here. I do for locallama and dynavap. But ideally you cross post to the lemmy communities to add content here too so that those like you have a better chance to find a home.
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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 was on Sync for Reddit before going here, and checked out Lemmy as the devs switched platform. So the joke's on them, my UX is basically identical.
That said, sucks that people shy away because of complexity.
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Have you tried https://piefed.social/ ? Compatible with Lemmy (allows you to import your subscriptions list actually) and with a different approach: https://join.piefed.social/blog/
I dont know what you are talking about. What subscriptions am i adding to where?
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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?
Hot take - I don't blame them. The who's federated with who and who can see what, and how it works is confusing as absolute fuck and extremely poorly explained.
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Don't over think it, the people who want to be here will be.
Unpopular opinion maybe but I like Lemmy and lemmy users and I'm glad that we're a bit different from Reddit. At least in my experience it feels a bit different.
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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?
Wait wait wait... This implies people like new reddit... That shit makes my eyes bleed wtf
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Unless we fix the UX problems in Lemmy, a Bluesky-like alternative of reddit is going to pop up, and overtake Lemmy, like what happened with Mastadon
It's a solved problem. Check out phtn.app and vger.app also Alexandrite, Next and Tesseract. Like the problem is solved 5 times over.
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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?
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.
