Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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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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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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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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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.
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They don’t understand what federation is
They can't use email..?
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Or even just accepting a default, or a randomly assigned one.
There was something in retail I learned. There are people who will come in on sale days, and they will demand perfect customer service, and demand the lowest prices, and ask for more sales and bring coupons, all while talking about how they spend so much money there and that they're so loyal. Then they'll leave and you'll never see them again
You can spend time and effort with them, the ones who only care about the cheapest place, or you can spend time with the customers who are actually there regularly. The ones who get to know your names, who are loyal, or enjoy a sale sure but also will be there even when there isn't one.
I don't want to attract users simply because reddit bad, and cater our experience for people who can't bother to learn just the basic tenant of the fediverse. I want to cater our experiences for those who are here daily, and the ones who are genuinely interested. It's the longer slower approach, but we'll stay more true to our goals
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Nice comparison
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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.
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That was Aol.
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The communities you are subscribed too, which show up in your Subscribed feed.
Those can be imported into Piefed, maybe the transition easier.
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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.
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I stand corrected. However:
Neither Jerboa, the first app on join-lemmy.org and the one by the Lemmy devs, nor Lemmy.World's own web interface gave me this option. I downloaded Thunder, Voyager, and Sync, and only Thunder gave me that as an option. When searching how to block instances, the top results are that you can't (at least on DDG).
So, unless I'm being incredibly stupid right now, I can block instances, but only if I use a specific app, or perhaps choose the "right" instance. That's still very bad UX.
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Cool for you to do a presentation. Feel free to share how it went here afterwards!
