Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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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
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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
I did this for a couples posts that popped up on redditalrs that werent lemmy, they were definitelty alread netuered and ready for ads, worse than reddit
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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.
So you, a normal person, join and instantly when a meme or comment allude to being altruistic, you leave? It's so unfathomable to me how this is probably true. So many people need the world to be egomaniac or they get uncomfortable. Maybe they're the problem though
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Unless we use one of those as the default UI, the problem isn't solved, people will give up before knowing of their existence.
You can literally just share phtn.app and say its how you use the threadiverse/lemmy, it doesnt need to be hosted on a site with the same lemmy instance you can login to any account through these frontends
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It's worse than reddit. It's more liberal.
Literally in this thread is another person calling it too left and another calling it too right.
You notice the things you don't like more. Political ideology is always going to have a spread the problem is the argumentative user base and user self superiority. -
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?
endless wars of who's federeated with who
i've been here for months and months, i might have seen this mentioned as an aside once or twice. but "endless wars"?
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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.
Half the fun of lemmy is all the frontends, apps, and customization options in general sprinkeld about
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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.
Eh, I kinda get it. I think there should be a default instance with curated feeds coming auto-subscribed into.
I don't remember if this is the case since I signed up almost a year ago, and I use on the phone exclusively with Voyager
