Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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The only real federation dramas I can think of were relating to Hexbear and Beehaw. If Greenleaf was on one of those instances then maybe it could explain their skewed perspective. Otherwise yeah, I don't get it.
Those went on and on and on and on for years though - it was only 3 months ago that Discuss.Online finally defederated from Lemmy.ml, making it the first top ranked instance that would be suitable to recommend to Redditors. And even then lemmy.ml still remains to bully and abuse the potential users with tankie BS (bOtH sIdEs SaMe don't ya'know).
Also before those two started there was Lemmygrad and Exploding Heads, and others I cannot recall off the top of my head but they really do go back a ways - defederation fights is kinda Lemmy's whole main entire deal. Sadly, I am not kidding: it's a Nazi bar effect where you can't convince people to join a bar that welcomes Alt-Right Nazis (although in this case it's Alt-Left tankies), bc they are turned off by such.
It's fine if we ignore what those users want btw, it's just less so if we don't acknowledge who we really are, and then wonder why nobody likes us - that kind of incel culture is not okay, at least not with me, and I will stand by that.
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This is how I ended up on a German server. I don’t speak German but really isn’t an issue. Just pick one.
Hey at least you'll never run out of ich_iel!
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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?
Maybe better TLDR of how it works will help people realise it doesn't matter too much which instance they pick
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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.
I don't really buy it tbh. People nowadays take pride in using stuff without understanding it. From Cookie Clicker, to even something as dangerous as car driving. In theory, they should be salivating at the Fediverse.
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Picking a starter is easy. Everyone knows that pokémon is a game about collecting creatures, and everyone knows what fire/ water/ grass is, so no one's gonna be stumped. Not everyone is gonna immediately know what an instance is, or what it does, or what it's there for
At least a blåhaj is kind of like a pokémon.
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You indeed made the good choice, Lemmy.cafe is the one
Yeah, it only took me 4 tries and I still am ready to jump ship if needed.
Why not use both Lemmy and another platform?
Already am, but at least on Reddit the mods can pretend to ban/control the propaganda accounts, but over here they are the only ones posting content (for my country) and that's tiring... the rest of the content is the same here and Reddit, so I feel more inclined to stay on Reddit since I don't really post anything anyway (I don't even comment over there anymore) and Lemmy feels like something I rather delete more and more... been thinking about PieFed, but the same problem as everything Fediverse, I have to pick a goddamn instance and I don't have energy for that for now.
If it helps, the issue is much less prominent for PieFed. Pick https://piefed.social/ bc it is the flagship and new features will just magically appear every week or so (not joking! the pace of development really is that fast!) Also it's easier to not have to start the community joining process for every community - that one being (by far) the largest for PieFed means that more often than any other instance, that work will have been done for you.
Also, when you join, you will become energized about the Fediverse again - the startup wizard helping you pick communities to subscribe to based off of your interests will make you happy:-). Whether it's worth the pain of learning a whole new system after that or not... is up to you, but seriously if you need that jolt of positivity, sign up TODAY! (you can always abandon it tomorrow, though I hope you won't, and am betting that actively seeing it in front of you may help... although tbf there is a bit of a learning curve as you adjust, and yet only bc there's so much MORE you can do with PieFed, like Lemmy has just Subscribed vs. All, whereas PieFed has a whole slew of new options to add to that, in the Topics, in choosing to receive Notifications for content rather than have to navigate to it, and new stuff is coming like personalized multi-communitied as well - it kinda really is awesome and exciting!?
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If that was a legitimate issue, MMO’s (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn’t have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.
But in an MMO, you still get the same content no matter what server you choose. Over here, it directly impacts what content you can interact with based on (de)federation.
PvP v. PvE seems like it would make s difference, probably?
But yeah I get you: the list of varied options is too large, and worse yet opaque.
Fwiw Blaze most often just recommends 2-3 options to current Redditors, to KISS (Keep It SimpleS:-).
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One didn't allow down votes. Seemed like a good idea. I rarely down vote. But in practice, when I do it's for a reason. And I want the option.
Another went down for roughly a week. So that didn't work out.
Which is one reason I embraced Communick; a paid instance. Been here since.
Communick is a nice option. I have an account there too. Unfortunately many Lemmings are weirdly hostile to it being a paid service, so it hasn't gotten much traction.
I think having more small business type Lemmy servers would be a decent solution to the onboarding difficulties people are discussing in this thread. There's definitely a chunk of users who just need the security of having someone to contact if they are confused about something or something isn't working. And if they're paying for it then the provider has an incentive to give them customer support.
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Copy past that into your browser, then log in with your username and password?
I'm not very tech savvy compared to a lot of Lemmings but I'm definitely above average. So I'm not trying to throw shade, just trying to help. The more people who get the hang of things is the more people who can teach others how to do it.
There reportedly are some slowness issues for people in the USA, where most Redditors would be coming from? Perhaps the updates currently in progress and still planned will help.
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If they find Lemmy "too hard to understand", do we really want them here?
I do. Anything is better than the sites they are on currently. More different opinions can help a place grow.
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I think a big problem is a lot of the explainers for new users, at least the ones that were around back when I first joined Mastodon, were or are absolute dog shit. They were all existential explanations rather than practical ones. I was trying to figure out which instance to join, and why one might be better for me than another, and every explainer I saw was basically a variation on, "iT's JuSt LikE EmAiL. wHy Is tHaT hArD? sToP bEiNg So sTuPid, DuMmY." None of them really explained the user experience, and how different instances might affect it, let alone the existence of the local and global feeds and how your instance choice affects those. It was like asking someone how to use chopsticks and them telling you, "It's easy. Just put food in your mouth with them. Works just like a fork."
Technically true, but it omits some pretty crucial information.
Once you're into it and have the lay of the land, it seems really simple in retrospect. But if you're coming in cold with no idea how any of it works, and the only help you get is some dickhead shouting, "EmAiL! iT's LiKe EmAiL!" then the learning curve seems a lot steeper than it actually is.
True but they've improved dramatically - especially what Blaze is telling people now in r/RedditAlternatives. (it's sth like 5 sentences now, only what they need to know - see it live here)
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If it helps, the issue is much less prominent for PieFed. Pick https://piefed.social/ bc it is the flagship and new features will just magically appear every week or so (not joking! the pace of development really is that fast!) Also it's easier to not have to start the community joining process for every community - that one being (by far) the largest for PieFed means that more often than any other instance, that work will have been done for you.
Also, when you join, you will become energized about the Fediverse again - the startup wizard helping you pick communities to subscribe to based off of your interests will make you happy:-). Whether it's worth the pain of learning a whole new system after that or not... is up to you, but seriously if you need that jolt of positivity, sign up TODAY! (you can always abandon it tomorrow, though I hope you won't, and am betting that actively seeing it in front of you may help... although tbf there is a bit of a learning curve as you adjust, and yet only bc there's so much MORE you can do with PieFed, like Lemmy has just Subscribed vs. All, whereas PieFed has a whole slew of new options to add to that, in the Topics, in choosing to receive Notifications for content rather than have to navigate to it, and new stuff is coming like personalized multi-communitied as well - it kinda really is awesome and exciting!?
)I really really doubt the part about the content based on my interests part, I've tried Lemmy, Mastodon and Pixelfed, none of the has any content that I care about enough to join a community but they have way too much US politics (WAY TOO MUCH), so it really doesn't encourages me to try anything new on the fediverse (like Loops, picking an instance, creating user just to find no content for me?).
I'd like to know how good or bad the instance block works on PieFed, because here on lemmy I still see hexbear posts that other users crosspost, even when my instance already defederated that 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?
So my understanding from reading this (and other threads on Lemmy) is that:
-A majority of Lemmy users would rather the userbase remained small (in comparison to corporate social media and even compared to Mastodon).
-And a small but vocal minority wants to grow Lemmy to the point of being at least one of the choices, if not the de facto preferred alternative, on the mind of most Redditors who are sick of Reddit.
Is that accurate?
edit: formatting
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The problem with that is there is no centralized website you go to for Lemmy. The closest thing to that would be the various apps you use for Lemmy so my question would be where would you put this quiz? I think when people talk about joining a server being hard it's just hard for people used to a centralized social media to get used to the idea that one social media platform can be made up of a bunch of different websites and it becomes overwhelming to even figure out where to go. They're very used to just going to reddit's website so if they can't just look up Lemmy and click the first link to join it's gonna be too complex.
Just go to https://discuss.online, easy.
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A lot of disingenuous Lemmy users in that thread pretending that picking a server is more confusing than filing your taxes. I think join-lemmy should probably hot-list like 6 or 7 servers instead of making you choose via a primary interest, since you can migrate your account later anyway. But I am personally not tech oriented and managed to make an account and find an app without an issue.
I know this might hurt to read but the average reddit user probably is someone who doesn't know how email works.
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It's also less likely to happen now. Back when that happened, users didn't have the ability to block instances and so it was up to the admins to do that for everyone.
It's now possible to block instances at the user level
Not really though - that only mutes communities, while the users are still free to troll you by replying and generating notifications in posts sent to other communities.
Worse, that protection has even weakened rather than strengthened over time - the notifications used to be blocked. I almost decided to leave Lemmy myself when I continued to receive notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after accidentally responding to a post that I encountered in All - I hadn't read the sidebar, I didn't know about that instance, and so how was I supposed to know!?
I did that in Lemmygrad, and then again in [email protected] - and after that, I very much understand why people say that we are miserable tankie trolls over here.
It's the Nazi bar effect: "We" might be fine, but there are places here that anyone can just wander into without any advanced notice of what will happen...and then they leave. And complain over in r/RedditAlternatives, warning others against attempting the same.
And since it's TRUE, we DESERVE this reputation. 100% of the people I've ever mentioned Lemmy to have outright chided me for having mentioned it. I can see why, with such bOtH sIdEs SaMe content as this:
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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?
because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
No, it isn't.
The UX is fine. It's clean, fast, and functional. Anyone who is too fancy for "old Reddit" can stay on new Reddit with the bots and Xers. They'd just come over and be nothing but insufferable anyway.
o.oMultiple front ends and themes are available. In the end, we're here for the conversation, not fancy graphics, sounds, or CSS trash.
If someone can't get past picking a server or simple graphics, the likelyhood of them being any benefit here is minimal. The more is not always the merrier.
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How old are you, out of interest? Your posts in your similar thread about default viewing experience makes it seem like you want an Instagram-style image browser rather than the link aggregator which Reddit and Lemmy actually are.
Isn't the "tiling" view on PieFed like that? Link
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I think it will probably address a few of the issues you have with Lemmy, and then you will join the piefed enthusiasts like @[email protected] @[email protected]
Absolutely. Case in point: I got a notification now when you tagged me, while a month or possibly even a week ago I would not have. There's new features weekly here!:-D
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- Stop making blanket claims about instances you like or dislike, no matter how fair you feel they may be, and don't fall for the bait of others doing it. This is just drama and is exhausting to read about.
- Instead of suggesting people "join Lemmy", say things like "Join Lemmy at programming.dev" (or whatever instance you yourself are using). Sure, "but picking a server is hard" will always probably be a complaint, but leading with the one you personally use is the best way around it. If you're on a hobby focused instance (like I am) then maybe suggest a generic instance to people outside of your hobby. Don't be afraid to suggest lemmy.world. It's better to suggest the biggest instance than endlessly debate about which one is the best to suggest.
