Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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I assumed (probably incorrectly) that users would be visiting Lemmy via apps, so the UX would depend on which app they used.
I don't know. I have a soft spot for Lemmy. The interactions here seem more genuine less about updoots.
Having to choose a server and it influencing what content you can see if the biggest UX issue, not the availability of apps.
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If you joined a German-speaking WoW server as a non-speaking German, the experience was going to be subpar
Yes, and if you join a German-speaking instance as a non-German speaking user, the experience will also be subpar. Hence I talked about content, not language.
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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?
I said it before and I'll say it again, Lemmy's (and Mastodon's) issue is that the users experience is influenced by the defederation.
The server side needs to be a decentralized database stored on a bunch of servers with all content available from one website with an API so people can develop apps for it, but otherwise the decentralization should have zero impact on what content the users have access to. In other words, do like Reddit but instead of having a ton of servers owned by AWS hosting everything, have those servers be owned by anyone who wants to host part of the database.
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it feels like old reddit
Wait, when did that become a bad thing? I exclusively browsed old.reddit.com because the new layout is a fucking abomination.
When I first read it I thought they were mentioning that as a selling point! But yeah it seems like they're saying it like it's a bad thing.
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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?
Sounds like a skill issue to me.
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it feels like old reddit
Wait, when did that become a bad thing? I exclusively browsed old.reddit.com because the new layout is a fucking abomination.
That's the feature! Not a bug.
The new reddit design sucks and always has, other than dark mode.
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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?
Why is “drama” on Lemmy always highly exaggerated by people?
“Endless wars of who federates with who”. What is that person even talking about and who the fuck would even care as a normal user?
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I have friends who still only use old.reddit and refuse to switch to new UI.
This is me. Frankly, I'm surprised people are choosing to use the new UI, but I guess maybe they only discovered reddit when it had the new UI.
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For me, a major issue isn't even the UI. It's federation control. On Mastodon & co, I can mute entire instances, cutting out A LOT of bullshit. On Lemmy, if I want that kind of control, I need to run my own instance. Doable, but kinda overkill.
It's one thing to hide individual subreddits on a centralised platform. It's another thing entirely to have many sites building a big platform, with the same communities duplicated with different rules and followings. That's just a game of wack-a-mole at that point.
And if I don't like the instance's communities, chances are I don't want to interact with its users either, leading to even more wack-a-mole.
You can literally block instances as a user on Lemmy and have been able to do so good quite some time. No need to run your own instance.
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Having to choose a server and it influencing what content you can see if the biggest UX issue, not the availability of apps.
Ah, I see what you're saying. Under normal circumstances, I would suggest to new users to signup on the "flagship instance", but in Lemmy's case… nah.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not certain what content I'm not seeing because, well, I haven't seen it
. Some instances seem to do a good job of only blocking content from notoriously bad sources. -
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?
I must be in the minority because I post so rarely that I don't sign up when I 'join' the platform, I sign up when I want to post something. When I first wanted to post something, I just joined the instance it was going to be on. (Also because it's queer, which I don't tell you about for consistency). I also don't care that much about not seeing what my instance has defederated. Or actually, not being able to comment on it, because I actually go on programming.dev sometimes, without having an account there. I don't really get it. The fact that my Instance technically requires an application might actually be a UX hurdle, but otherwise, you just click Sign Up, enter email, name, and password, and that's it, right? It could be a UX problem that you miss out on content you don't see, but you also already see a load of content that you're not going to miss out on. Tutorials on how x-instance moving works might be cool though, if they don't already exist. Making them more visible might limit the defederation FOMO.
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it feels like old reddit
Wait, when did that become a bad thing? I exclusively browsed old.reddit.com because the new layout is a fucking abomination.
Boost feels a lot like rif which I was using and which shutdown made me switch to lemmy.
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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?
The problem is trying to get people into "Lemmy", where they have to understand federation and choose an instance, etc - instead of trying to get people into a specific instance. I know you don't want one bloated instance, but if that was the mission it would be a lot easier to get people on board.
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Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it 'wars'.
As for UX, there's definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstancethout explicitly subbing to them all.
But I don't think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.
eh, back when the "exodus" was happening it felt like every second post is about defederation. Nowadays you don't hear much about it anymore, but if you only looked back then I see how you could come to that conclusion.
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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?
The biggest UX issues, in my opinion, is the process of choosing an instance and content discovery.
When you go to "join lemmy", rather than choosing a username, you're presented a big list of instances, and you have no idea what that means and what it means for your experience if you choose one. Even though in reality it doesn't really matter, just having the list paraylyses the user as it's not a process they're used to. Users are likely asking themselves:
- Am I going to miss out on content from other instances?
- Do I need an account per instance to interact with their communities?
Sometimes I think it would be best if we could have some kind of read-only instance people can create an account on and get stuck in first, then choose an instance to sign up to once they understand it. The instance would be locked down so they couldn't create any communities. So basically when they they're directed to join-lemmy and go to sign up, they create an account on that instance right away and get started.
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Ah, I see what you're saying. Under normal circumstances, I would suggest to new users to signup on the "flagship instance", but in Lemmy's case… nah.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not certain what content I'm not seeing because, well, I haven't seen it
. Some instances seem to do a good job of only blocking content from notoriously bad sources.That's the thing though, it's the luck of the draw and you might be unlucky and sign up to a bad instance and then it's too late, first impression has been made and the user just goes back to Reddit.
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It might not be a bad experience for you, but it's a bad experience for what looks like the vast majority of people.
Don't take my word for it, look at the hundreds of upvotes in the post I shared.OK but that's still no explanation. I want to understand the problem deeper than "it's bad".
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That is a UX issue.
UX is like a Joke, if you need to explain it to someone, it's a bad Joke/UX
Explain what exactly?
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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?
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The apps are kinda meh. I haven't found one that doesn't come with significant disadvantages yet, and I've tried FIVE.
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There's no recommendations feed. You see what you're subscribed to, or everything. No in-between. You can't see what you've subscribed to, and a few posts that the algorithm thinks you might like. People like to complain about the algorithm, but one reason it's so addictive is that it's useful.
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Notifications don't work in every app
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Just having a feed that behaves normally seems to be really hard to do for apps. Stop slowing me posts I've already scrolled past, and when I click home/pull down to refresh, I want new posts, not the same thing again that I've already scrolled past and ignored. Some apps have settings (that are somehow not on by default) to hide read posts and mark posts read on scroll, but I haven't tried an app where that works every time.
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There's no "main" app. Think about Reddit before the API fees. There used to be a default app. It had its issues, but most features worked out of the box, and most things were intuitive and normie-friendly. You could use that to get comfortable with the social network itself, and then eventually try other apps when something got too annoying.
Compare that with Lemmy. You want to try it, and you already have to deal with choice paralysis. A ton of apps on the website, with utterly unhelpful descriptions ("an open-source Lemmy client developed by so-and-so"; wow, exactly zero of those words help me pick) and a random order that doesn't even let me default to one most popular one.
Quite a few apps focus on niche UI features like swipe-based navigation while still not having the basics down right. I'm several months into having joined Lemmy and I still haven't found an app that feels somewhat right. That is a challenge not one of the other social networks has managed. Congrats, Lemmy. Impressive.
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Picking a server and signing up in general is complicated. And it's an impactful decision that you have NO tools to make so early, unless you start researching like it's school homework.
.world? That's popular but you'll be judged for having joined it, plus you lose access to the piracy community. .ml? Hope you like communists and DRAMA. And if you get it wrong, there's no intuitive and easy way to migrate. You clunkily export your settings and re-import them; the servers will NOT talk to each other. And even then you lose some stuff.
This UX issue is tough. I don't have an easy solution. But I'm sure a UX expert could find one.
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Manual validation of your sign-up by a human. What is this, a Facebook group? If you introduce a 24-hour delay so early in the process, of course people are going to fall off.
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The mouse logo is kinda ugly, won't lie. I'm sure it's a more potent people repellent than you think.
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There is a LOT of tribalism. On Reddit, there's r/Canada, that's full of convinced conservatives that won't hesitate to artificially skew the discourse. And there's r/OnGuardForThee, basically the same but with progressives angry at the conservatives.
On Lemmy, that feels like the rule, not the exception. I just joined communities based on my interests, and my feed is full of communist vs communist vs non-communist drama. Can we frickin' chill?
If I need to start filtering out whole fields of interest that were taken over, joining less popular community clones or literally defederating instances to get a good experience, we've got it wrong. Normal people don't wanna do that when they literally just got here. They'll just leave.
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Somehow even more US-centric than Reddit. So... Much... American politics.
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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?
I am very new here, and not as passionate about the fediverse as some of you are (like your average redditor most likely).
Reading the comments here I think that the fact that you notice decentralization as a user can be a problem for many but offering simple instance lists, community lists in the UI can mitigate that and make it more a feature than a nuisance (for those that have trouble navigating it).
On desktop, I don't mind switching servers with different URLs, especially since I can read them all with the same proton UI. However, on mobile (I spend more time on social media via mobile than desktop, I imagine most people do these days) using the Jerboa app I cannot figure out how to "visit" another server. I can't enter the URL, I cannot click on the URL, I cannot search for @URL and get a list of the communities hosted on it..
I am sure there is documentation somewhere explaining how I achieve this, but I should not have to look for that just to acces different instances. I use lemmy on breaks mostly and as I said, am not passionate enough about social media to read manpages for it.. I imagine some will think "then we don't need people like you here", but in the end if close-to mainstream user adoption is a goal, you kind of will need people who just want to look at cats and discover communities as well, and making jumping between instances and finding communities is an important part of making that happen.
