Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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The UX is objectively bad, it breaks most good design principles
That's easily fixable by using a third-party app such as Voyager (or on the web on wefwef.app)
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That would help if they had a clue which one was near them.
Default to "nearest" one?
If you're not a native English speaker, you could try joining an instance that speaks your language, for example.
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The problem is that in order to become a proper reddit replacement Lemmy needs enough users to create niche communities.
There are plenty of active communities related to technology and politics but there is no equivalent to r/batmanarkham or r/letgirlshavefun.
Plus there are plenty of communities that are all but abandoned.
Doing a 1/1 recreation of niche communities from reddit is a fools errand. Let communities develop on their own, or even better, simply federate existing communities.
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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?
IMHO, the UX is bad, but the user base is also repellant. It's further left than Reddit so most people who jump in bounce right off. That's going to be difficult to change organically. Especially because most users respond to this with "good." So there's definitely no appetite to appeal to a wider audience. I predict Lemmy will become increasingly ideologically partisan and isolated.
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I agree with you, but at the same time if there aren't enough users, small and niche sublemmys will never grow and have enough content to be interesting.
Once upon a time Reddit used to be just a single subreddit. And it was fine. Lemmy already has enough users for separate subreddits to be actually kinda viable, even if they are not too active.
We'll be fine.
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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?
Could there be an option for a sorting hat that could either: look at the redditor's post history and determine a good server for them or simply spin the wheel. Either way would get the lazies shit posting without them having to learn anything about fediverse. I know I would have just spun the wheel.
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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?
Lemmy is too right wing to serve as a good Reddit replacement. The queer communities on Reddit don't want to move here because their members will be harassed.
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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?
Reddit ux is also ass. Only difference between reddit and lemmy is that the federation bit is extremely confusing and not intuitive.
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Lemmy is too right wing to serve as a good Reddit replacement. The queer communities on Reddit don't want to move here because their members will be harassed.
right wing?
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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?
"It was just endless war about who is federated with who?"
Thanks the anti-tankies turds and their constants whining.
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People forget that user experience isn't just the stuff on the screen you interact with. There is a governance piece that is lacking in a lot of instances, and in the open source community as a whole. A lot of the successful projects out there are backed by some kind of foundation.
Take a look at the latest Hexbear drama. Some person out there owned the domain for their instance and let it expire. Now they are in a bidding war with a crypto site with a hexagon-related name. If they had formed some kind of organization or entity that registered the domain and owned the instance, this probably wouldn't have happened. Their users wouldn't get redirected to a domain auction site when trying to access the site. That's not an ideal user experience. It destroys trust.
SDF being a 501(c)(7) is one of the reasons that it's my home instance. For me, it provides a level of trust that an instance run by some random person on the internet doesn't. If there is a big federation/defederation debate, then it's really up to the membership to decide, and not a collection of admins or a single person getting the vibe of the users.
Another thing to remember is that Lemmy really shouldn't be competing against Reddit. The purpose of Reddit is to have the user generate content in order to keep the user's attention on the site so they can sell targeted advertisements. This is the basic business model for all of commercial social media. It has nothing to do with creating communities. That is secondary. If you want more people on Lemmy so that there is more content for you to consume, just stay on Reddit or TikTok. They need to sell ads in order to fund model training to keep your engagement up in order to sell more ads in order to provide quarterly growth to their shareholders. If you want more people on Lemmy because more brains mean better communities, then focus the communities.
The real opportunity for the fediverse is getting a lot of the existing non-profits, social organizations, and other types of communities to set up their own instances. This answers the “what instance do I join?” question by joining the instance associated with the community you're already involved in. Another reason I'm on SDF is retro computing. If you're really into your local makerspace, then you probably have a community ready to go for a Lemmy instance. If you're involved in your HOA and you all have a Facebook page or are all over Nextdoor, maybe set up a Lemmy instance. In all these cases, the organizational infrastructure is there for the administrative stuff like getting a domain and paying for hosting.
Also, I'm old enough to remember that Facebook took off when everyone's parents started joining. Imagine if the AARP rolled out a Lemmy instance. They are big enough put some serious money into development. You would probably get a lot of accessibility improvements.
Feddit.org and lemmy.ca are also non profits
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"It was just endless war about who is federated with who?"
Thanks the anti-tankies turds and their constants whining.
I don't think anti-tankies can be blamed when said tankies regularly engage in brigading of other instances. Like is everyone actually behaved this wouldn't have been an issue.
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IMHO, the UX is bad, but the user base is also repellant. It's further left than Reddit so most people who jump in bounce right off. That's going to be difficult to change organically. Especially because most users respond to this with "good." So there's definitely no appetite to appeal to a wider audience. I predict Lemmy will become increasingly ideologically partisan and isolated.
I don't think partisan is even the right word here as many Lemmy users are too far left for mainstream political parties. In fact I am further left than most any mainstream party, but am still considered a capitalist shill by people here.
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Feddit.org and lemmy.ca are also non profits
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I mean, I lost all my old posts (or at least access to them) when two instances I was on just poof'd.
Yeah this happened to me too. I guess I made bad choices.
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right wing?
Yeah, it's full of tankies and transphobes.
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I don't think anti-tankies can be blamed when said tankies regularly engage in brigading of other instances. Like is everyone actually behaved this wouldn't have been an issue.
What you call brigading are just normal people like me who encountered right-wing america-centered bullcrap and react to it.
I never saw tankies spamming the lemmyverse to whine about world.
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Reddit ux is also ass. Only difference between reddit and lemmy is that the federation bit is extremely confusing and not intuitive.
What's most annoying is that for 95% of users, federation doesn't even matter. You just log on and use lemmy exactly like reddit. All feds are consolidated onto my front page anyway.
People make a big deal about it, it definitely intimidated me when I first logged up. It's one of the reasons I put off getting into lemmy for such a long time, and it's frustrating that in the end, it really makes no difference.
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Has software usage really gotten to the point where the average person can't handle being given a choice about anything? Where it's just too much effort to do anything more than mindlessly click on whatever is presented to them?
These people must have been paralyzed with fear when they had to choose an email provider.
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I don't think partisan is even the right word here as many Lemmy users are too far left for mainstream political parties. In fact I am further left than most any mainstream party, but am still considered a capitalist shill by people here.
You fascist swine
