Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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The political leaning is definitely unfortunate. The fediverse should be for everyone, not just a certain political section.
whoa bro chill with the fascism /s
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The reddit concept of subreddits also doesn't work well with federation IMO (at least no Lemmy's implementation).
Want to talk about video games? Well, there's no /r/games, instead there are bunch of different /c/games on different servers with varying amounts of activity. You basically gotta make the "pick a server" decision again whenever you post something. If you make the wrong choice, your post might not get seen by anyone, and even if you post to the biggest sub, you'll be missing out on eyeballs from people on other servers who aren't subscribed to that instance for whatever reason.
For example, lemmy.ml/c/linux_gaming and lemmy.world/c/linux_gaming have around the same number of subscribers. Should I post to both? Maybe the same people subscribe to both, so that's pointless? Or maybe I'll miss out on a lot of discussion if I post only to one? There's no way for me to know.
For me, it makes Lemmy less useful than reddit for asking really niche questions and getting useful answers. For posting comments on whatever pops up in my feed though, it works great.
I don't have any good solutions to this, and I'm sure it has been considered already. When I first joined, I remembered seeing people bring this same issue up, but it doesn't seem like it went anywhere? (Or maybe it did?)
Its annoying but I also like it, you get different viewpoints and if you look at the feeds the focusses are usually different, like one might have mostly news and trailers, the other mostly discussions on questions, there are like 10 different shows movies tv 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?
Lemmy doesn't need low bar registrations. Lemmy will grow slowly without the immaturities and the to pompous class.
People will build apps and make lemmy more "fun"
Corporate social media is easy because it keeps the ad clickers there. Do we really want that environment here?
All the quality (non bait clicking content suppliers) will come here and all the spam artists will stay over there.
Just let Lenny grow organically with a little barrier to climb and we'll be alright
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Ah Lemmy. Still full of comments from smug assholes pretending their lack of sonder is the good kind, and if they don't understand something it's cause it's worthless and pointless while their knowledge is the most important.
Yeah, there are other reasons than the UX/UI and the screenshot even shows it.
Pot, meet kettle.
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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.
People like that weren't going to add meaningfully to any discussion either way, if they flake that easily they were planning on lurking and likely wouldn't have commited to using this app over reddit, I was one of them til I got perm banned. I definitely preferred reddit because I had karma, over decade old accound so I could post wherever and had "credibility" in my head lol. Almost joined mbin before I realized I don't want user karma anymore. I do like post and comment upvotes/downvotes
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Having the ability to export your account data (say to a CSV) might be useful for this reason.
If you want to move to a new instance, you can pack your bags and head out.
You can probably imagine how this won't be a 1:1 transition, however, because the new instance might not have the same communities as the old instance. I commented on another thread about how it would be cool if Lemmy took your communities list, looked at how those communities federate for instance (or just do a word search on the new instance with names of the communities of the old instance), and serve you suggested new communities to subscribe to.
And if you can export your data, then there's no need to store it in a centralized way to make these types of actions doable, which favors privacy.
Some apps kinda let you do this
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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.
I pay 7$ monthly for 8 core 16gb ram littlecreek, yunohost for free, installed lemmy on it, works solid, use like 10% of the resources with friendica also on the server lol That site looks insanely expensive monthly.
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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.
Like I genuinely hope you dont pay that much littlecreek (im same dude as other comment) has a 3.50 deal for 4 core 4gb ram on lowendtalk, more than enough to run lemmy for yourself
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How did people figure out what email provider to use?
You'd get an email address from your ISP. Early on you'd just dial the ISP, send/receive email, and then automatically hang up. College freshmen were assigned a school email address.
Eventually, "web mail" became popular because you could log in from any computer, like at the library.
By the time email became unavoidable, everyone had already been assigned at least one email address. It was seen as a major feature of the internet itself.
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I specifically remember looking up tables of who defederates from who and what instances allow NSFW or downvoting because this was an issue among some of the top instances back then.
I ended up making 4 different accounts over 2 months until I landed on a server I'm happy with. That will never be acceptable to any normal user.
Every time someone brings up these issues, people here downplay them like you are doing it right now and nothing is ever done about it.
I looked this up when joining a month ago because I saw hella posts on it and joining world to not see the piracy community didnt help
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"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.
Idk why anyones upset about ppl who prefer new reddit not wanting to be here, exact type of person who should stay there
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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.
It makes a difference if you signed up for the only instance early on, and now everyone assumes you're a tankie.
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I don't want to have conversations with children.
Then I guess make sure you don't talk to yourself.
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Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
I thought that when I first joined, as the weeks pass, its turned into a no, I like the community here, reddit is just a headache that I was addicted to
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Aren't you guys sick of forced infinite growth in every aspect of our collective existence? The Fediverse is not shareholder owned, we don't have to be slaves to The Red Line That Must Go Up. Reddit went to shit when it was aggresively mainstreamed, I don't want it to happen to lemmy as well.
Exactly, I feel the mindset of 'line must go up or you die' is really ingrained in people's minds. Even if everyone leaves for something else lemmy will still be here, slowly getting better with updates and time.
Doesn't matter how many people use it. As long as even 1 person wants to use lemmy it will be here...
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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 UX is identical to old Reddit. Come on.
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Man. You just gave me an idea (which would matter if I wasn’t a complete idiot).
Instead of servers that all attempt to be a sort of clone of Reddit, servers could focus on content similar to the way subreddits work.
So you’d join any one of these servers and federate with other servers just like now, only content would be focused between servers.
Example:
This server is a games server. It has /c/games, /c/fallout, /c/vintagegaming, etc.
This server will focus on news and politics. It has /c/worldnews, /c/marketnews, etc.
Sure, it would still have the issue of being fractured, but it would narrow it down so much that it would be more appealing and easier to navigate.
It’s probably too late for that.
Ultimately, I’m happy with the fediverse. Algorithms aren’t dictating what I see. There’s no profit incentive that will lead to bad decisions, so when bad decisions are made, folks will talk about it and come to a solution.
I miss old Reddit, but it’s gone.
thats topics lol, piefed and mbin
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The tough part for me is that the reason I use Reddit is for bullshitting with people about sports teams I like. Lets look at some of the communities here.
- Baltimore Orioles -- There's one on lemmy.world with 150 subscribers. The last post is from 4 months ago and it's a game thread posted by a bot with 0 comments. There's also one on fanaticus.social with the last post from 7 months ago.
- Carolina Panthers -- There's one on fanaticus.social with 3 subscribers.
- Miami Heat -- There's one on lemmy.world with 10 subscribers.
- Pittsburgh Penguins -- Again, lemmy.world with 11 subscribers.
I'd love to get off reddit but until there's actually people to talk with, this place is just never going to meet the needs of sports content that I use Reddit for. I had no interest in Bluesky until some people actually got on it as well. The Shutdown Fullcast for college football brought a bunch of people and fans there so it gave some utility to the site. Without utility, there's no reason to be here.
Yeah, people actively surrounding one water cooler aren't likely to go across the room to a different water cooler with no one there to start a new community. There's a lot of mental and social effort required there.
In the news in tech communities the moderation was becoming oppressive. If someone pisses all over the water cooler, then people are a lot more likely to change it up.
We see the same thing in the niche video gaming communities.
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If the miniscule effort of signing up for a platform keeps someone away, they probably wouldn't be a good community member anyway.
It's not minescule. I remember actually taking days because I don't understand where and how to. You're a good person I can tell so stop being elitist as fuck it's childlike
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Unless we fix the UX problems in Lemmy, a Bluesky-like alternative of reddit is going to pop up, and overtake Lemmy, like what happened with Mastadon
Easy fix, if it isnt federated I give them a one star and talk about how im tired of ads and corporate influence in my discussion forums so id rather use the threadiverse, prob does nothing but if it gets even one person to google and switch it was worth the 5 seconds it took to type
