Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
-
If selecting a server is too much, then directing them to a random on that fits their criteria should solve the problem. Which joinlemmy, joinmastodon, joinoixelfed, and so on do.
If even that is too much, then I'm totally fine without those people as I question what kind of stuff they'll be saying.
And this isn't even elitist. It's not "you have to have the ActivityPub spec memorised" or even know what ActivityPub is. It's like "which email host should I pick". No deeper than that.
If Facebook and Apple have eroded people's brains to the point where such a simple question cannot be answered without freaking out, then we're in trouble.
Upvoted.
If Facebook and Apple have eroded people's brains to the point where such a simple question cannot be answered without freaking out, then we're in trouble.
Yes. Thinking ability is gone. That's of last century.
Maybe I've just written my/our answer. Fuck that's depressing. Happily I'm old - I'll be dead soon. This will be your problem.
-
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.
Good point
-
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.
They sign up on AOL or Yahoo Mail or Gmail. Or get an email address through their ISP.
"Here's your address." They use it.
-
While I agree in general, there is a bit more as unlike email... Defederation is a thing.
They don't really need to know about that until they have had time on Lemmy to hear about what those defederated instances actually do
-
People always use the email comparison but it's really not the same, it's more complicated than that. We know it's not too much of a big deal but it is when you don't know what it means to be on a server.
I remember being presented with a choice of servers myself and wondering what on earth it meant, and just wanting to join the "default" one. Ultimately it doesn't matter too much but at the time it feels like a big hurdle.
Maybe it's more like picking a football team
-
None of that affects me, but if I switch, which one should I switch to?
The one I suggest the most lately is https://discuss.online/
-
I use the Boost app for Lemmy so it basically feels exactly like the ideal Reddit experience felt back then, which is fantastic.
As for being put off, the only thing that really bothers me is the extreme hatred for Windows and the deepthroating of Linux. It's creepy.
Like, I love Linux and use it for many things alongside Windows, but I don't get obsessively weird about it to the point of creating memes or going out of my way to tell people why they're wrong for using one over the other, you know?
If that were toned down I'd certainly feel a little more relaxed, but on the whole the Lemmy experience has been lovely
Have you tried blocking some communities?
-
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?
"Here's Lemmy. It's like Reddit. There's a bunch of different websites for it, but they all have basically the same things on them. Just join one near you, if you don't like it you can always use a different one later"
-
extra-instance account transfer request is going?
You mean settings or content?
Settings have been exportable for a while now.
Content cannot be and probably never will. Even Mastodon doesn't allow it:
Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.
Thank-you.
I was hoping that the content would be id linked to a user id so that moving an account would remain linked to the content if moved between instances.
It's not an inconceivable expectation for when instances close down or people find that the instance doesn't suit them.
Is that the case?
-
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.
I think all of that would be easy to add to Lemmy, they already have the sorting method for posts (New Comments), the option to sort comments as "Chat", and the option to disable voting. Maybe file a few feature requests on the Lemmy GitHub. It would be interesting to see an instance like this.
-
you can change later
You won't bring everything over
it won’t impact things
Lies! It will impact a LOT of things. Primarily your admins and federation. How could you possibly say that changing servers allows you to pick different admins (which is a good thing) but then say that the server doesn't matter? Plus there's server culture.
you can interact with any instance
Depends what server you're on
These things don't affect the average user (lurker) much at all. Ideally you just start with whatever instance and only move if you don't like it. A new user can't really know if an instance is bad or not before trying it.
(As long as there recommendation page doesn't give them an extremist instance)
-
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 one thing that I like about the fediverse is that it somehow unintentionally has a filter to keep the low effort people from poisoning the well.
I have been on the fediverse from 2019 and these types of arguments have been floated times and again at each exodus wave. they expect to be offered everything on a silver platter. they come into a new platform maintained by hobbyists and good will people and they expect it to offer the same features, experiences and user base or even better than the once on proprietary media that spend billions of dollars to acquire that user base. they get screwed by one company and hope that another for profit won't do the same. Lemmy is even easier than email, as you don't need to know the handle of people of communities you interact with you just search for them or explore the public feed. We don't need them here.
there are many aspects the fediverse can improve upon. decentralization or federation isn't one of them
-
You tell that to a normal user (and I mean NORMAL) and they will lose any interests in making the effort of attempting to pick a server... I know it sounds far fetched, but that's my experience with normal users, unless they have someone willing to hold their hand at every moment and every change, all these things scare them, no matter how simple they seem for us.
As someone who has had to explain to longtime Linux users why and how some arcane aspect of package management isn't grok-able by the common user, I understand where you're coming from with that point.
I do think the overall experience could be more intuitive and easier, but if the first concepts of federation and picking a server is too much for someone, I don't think that is possible to overcome since that's fundamental to this whole citizen controlled media experiment.
-
I suggested it to a few ppl and even offered to show them how to use it but they said it's "too hard to understand" sad times we live in.
If they find Lemmy "too hard to understand", do we really want them here?
-
And on manual validation for sign-ups
permissions/roles could improve this a lot https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3375#issuecomment-2657753039
Give thumbs up reactions on Github so the devs know what to prioritize
Not a bad idea!
-
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?
IMO if Lemmy had all the features that old.reddt had it would still be an objectivly worse UX experience. Federating reduces UX, that's just a rule.
We should focus on making the onboarding process as simple as possible like enabling social login (inb4 insecure and not private: let people make their choices), and making it easier to move between instances and understand what instance you're looking at.
-
Well, it's not because something has the potential to be addictive that it's necessarily bad. After all, a video game that isn't addictive at all could also be called boring.
I think the line between an enjoyable experience and unhealthy addictive features is drawn in user choice and the absence of malicious intent.
That's a fair point, actually. I suppose as long as an algorithm doesn't prioritize engagement at all costs, it could be a worthy addition.
-
"but it feels like old reddit". My god, imagine actively preferring the new reddit UI. Let them keep their shiny jangling keys instead of coming over here and pestering the devs for a snoovatar feature or whatever nonsense.
The 'maybe read for 2 minutes to figure it out' miniscule barrier to entry is a feature not a bug.
Two minutes (and you're being very optimistic here, for someone who isn't technically inclined it's almost certainly going to be more) of required reading on a subject that's just not even remotely interesting to 99% of people eliminates basically all non technical people. Because they just don't care enough to devote that time. If that's the user base you want, that works out, but I'd like people here who can hold a conversation about something other than Linux and Star Trek. It's honestly kinda boring here.
-
Would I be decreasing people's operating costs if I just opened an account on example.lol so most of my interaction was on my home instance?
Likely no. If one person on the instance is subscribed to a remote community, everything is synchronized anyways. If no one is subscribed to the remote community then it's probably a very small and low activity community anyways, which means it's a drop in the bucket difference.
So is a large part of lemmy.world cached on sh.itjust.works' server? Does Pixelfed, Loops or Peertube work the same way? I could see images or video being more of a burden to serve like that. Or does AP sync the metadata like thumbnail, video title, description, comments etc. and the video itself is torrented straight from the host server?
-
Good keep those numb nuts away. Reddit sucks not only because of Spez and his greedy overlords, many of the users suck as well and I bet there is a big overlap on the Venn diagram between people who suck and people who think lemmy is confusing
This is what we call "dipshit energy".
The fediverse is confusing and that's bad. It should be less confusing, and there should be less people making comments like that one. Quit it.
We'll get there sooner or later. Hopefully sooner.
