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?
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.
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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.
I don’t think that’s what the person on Reddit is referring to, but judging people by their choice of instance is dumb.
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There are a few .world posters who make two to three posts a day about how much they hate lemmygrad hexbear and .ml.
Well that’s just a waste of time really.
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Not necessarily. That's just what I did.
The point is, they aren't making a permanent decision. They can switch or move at any time for any reason.Yeah but you have to see it through the normal-user eyes, for them just creating a new account is a whole ordeal, then they see that ordeal makes them investigate the server before picking and then it turns out they picked wrong... For them that's that and they delete the app (never deleting the account, mind you), branding the whole lemmy experience under whatever server they picked first.
If there was some sort of... Quiz? That could help them pick... But a brutally honest one, since some instances have pretty extremists opinions, new users have to know what they are dealing with.
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You mentioned that Lemmy was insufferable, so I offered an alternative.
Isnt that a lemmy clone though? If the userbase is the problem why would a new interface help?
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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.
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.
Also
- name squatters mods who never post anything but just stay there as the sole mod because they were there first
- powertripping [email protected]
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The UX once you figure out what works for you in Lemmy is nice, the UX getting to that point is terrible, as many have said.
Most will quit before getting to the good part.Yeah, the UX of alexandrite, Voyager or even the Voyager web app for PC are sublime. I don't see any difference from reddit tbh.
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Really? You never ran into the endless "...furthermore, .ml must be defederated" posts?
Cofigure swipes to hide posts and just swipe them out? Idk, it's not hard.
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What would prevent the same happening in the next wave of rats jumping ship? They don't know anything about the servers or their niches, so they pick whatever. Listing all the servers and their missions is a good start for those motivated to join, but for those more on the fence, how do we ease the transition?
I’ve mentioned a list with info of some nature a few times, with people shutting down the idea. It always boiled down to “the instances may lie about what their instance is about”. In their heads what their write may be the truth, even if it isn’t. This would leave it up to a third party to make summaries of these instances, which may or may not be agreed upon. There may be too many drastic and conflicting ideologies.
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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?
Good, Lemmy doesn't need morons like these
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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.
Agree. It's not about being smug or entitled or whatever. Getting a simple lemmy client on your phone and signing up for the most basic instances takes literally 5 minutes of reading tops. And that's for non tech savvy readers. If you can't put 5 minutes of effort into an online discussion forum setup, then how can you be expected to put even 5 minutes of effort into a discussion post or in reading an article before commenting?
It's a natural filter indeed. And a good one at that. Keep the short attention spanners who need tiktok level ease of use on reddit.
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https://piefed.social/ has user-level instance muting similar to Mastodon
Does this extend to users? Currently, blocking on Lemmy.World with Thunder, if I block instance A, and a user from instance A interacts with instance B, I see that interaction.
Mastodon et. al. block everything coming from that instance, unfollows everyone, the whole nine yards. So far, I can only block the communities for sure, and have to continue blocking each user I come across.
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The UX for both Voyager and Sync seem really good. I've tried it out on a device, you can scroll before logging in, and when you try to create an account there aren't loops to jump through and a default instance is pre-selected
Voyager is just Apollo for Lemmy is why I use it
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Gonna don my tinfoil hat here for a second...
Was the monetization of the API a deliberate move to kick out the progressive and tech-literate long-time reddit users (myself included, with 16 year badge and centuryclub), to in turn make the site more of a Nazi, pro-Trump circle jerk?
Because I really think it succeeded. The whole atmosphere shifted that day, and I've barely been back except when I end up there out of muscle memory or a Google result...and those often have the best answers removed by someone who went through and scrubbed their account.
We all remember how Spez treated r/thedonald, right?
Regardless if it was the plan, it's the result.
I can't stand what it has become, especially when some of the most problematic subs have massive influence over the rest of the site, like wsb.
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There are a few .world posters who make two to three posts a day about how much they hate lemmygrad hexbear and .ml.
you will probably stop seeing much of that if you block users that post a lot to fediverselore and meanwhileongrad. They're like the /r/subredditdrama of lemmy
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People these days look weird at you if don't use Gmail so you can't see their Google Calendar invite or some other thing that only works with Google... People are literally pushing tech monopolies.
I still see lots of different emails out there, outlook/hotmail is still huge, yahoo occasionally, icloud in the US.
Among my techy friend circle all of us have either our own self hosted mail, a 'privacy' company email, or something in the middle.
All to say, I don't think it's that uphill of a battle for the very large percentage of Internet users to accept the way federation works.
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It's literally in the "Introduction" to lemmy (third paragraph):
An "introduction" to lemmy that's buried behind clicking through vague smalltext, and not any of the brightly colored buttons enticing you to pick a server.
This is bad UX.
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I still see lots of different emails out there, outlook/hotmail is still huge, yahoo occasionally, icloud in the US.
Among my techy friend circle all of us have either our own self hosted mail, a 'privacy' company email, or something in the middle.
All to say, I don't think it's that uphill of a battle for the very large percentage of Internet users to accept the way federation works.
I'm a student and don't know anyone who doesn't use Gmail here... Guess that's the result of Google dominating education.
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Strawman
It’s the same thing.
Email even has its own version of federation and de federation in dkim.
The only difference is that you’re oftentimes not given access to an email address from your internet provider by default anymore so you’re not automatically joined into the system.
People balking at choosing a server are not showing you a bad user experience, they’re showing that they don’t really want to be part of a reddit alternative.
And the broader lemmy/activitypub/whatever needs to figure out if it wants to be like beehaw and hexbear and abandon the shape of reddit or if it wants to duplicate it and try to compete with reddit.
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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.
Isn't that just NodeBB?
