Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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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?
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Not necessarily, but we don't want a accidental filter that filters out non tech savvy people. We want all kinds of people on Lemmy
Hell, it can filter out tech people too. I'm a programmer by trade, but I almost dipped on lemmy because the onboarding is confusing enough. Like, I obviously (mostly) figured it out, but I did consider going "eh fuck it" and dipping. The site is ultimately a luxury and not a requirement, so effort or confusion required to get all started up is also something that'll drive me to consider it not all worth it for some social media I'm not even sure I want to be a part of yet.
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Cofigure swipes to hide posts and just swipe them out? Idk, it's not hard.
Oh, sure, especially if it's the same few users. It's just mildly surprising to not even run into them.
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I'm a student and don't know anyone who doesn't use Gmail here... Guess that's the result of Google dominating education.
At what level? I get a student email from my college (outlook based) as do the professors, though communication is primarily through Canvas. So that's what I see most often in that context.
I think a lot of people have Gmail incidentally for things like YouTube and other Google account stuff, very few people know you can even bring your own mail.
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Using Boost for Lemmy and it's almost like I never switched.
Voyager for iOS feels just like Alien Blue/Apollo
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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?
Yea getting into Lemmy is confusing. I only use sync because it's easier, I have no idea how to even access it on desktop. It definitely needs some QoL improvements before I can really start recommending it to people
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Wait wait wait... This implies people like new reddit... That shit makes my eyes bleed wtf
I read a really good article recently about how people from different generations process information differently and so their UI preferences are wildly different.
The gist of it was
- A Boomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books. They choose one by an author they know, that their friends said was good.
- A Gen Xer or a Millennial walks into a bookstore to buy a book. The check the various authors they like, check that the cover art is appealing and read the backs of the different books, figuring out which one they want to read, then they buy that one.
- A Zoomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books, and feel bombarded by the ads for books. They check the authors the influencers they subscribe to on Youtube and Tik Tok say are good. They grab one of those based on the color of the cover, ignore the back and the cover art, flip it open to a random page, read that page and if what they read grabs their their attention they buy that book, but if it doesn't, they move on.
As a result, each of these people will prefer to interact with vastly different UX.
Of course these aren't hard and fast rules, set in stone and there are tons of exceptions, but it's a definite trend.
