Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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I think the irony here is that the user-friendliness experience of Bluesky stems from it being a centralized service (in practice). I seriously doubt most people who signed up for Bluesky even understand what "decentralized social media" means.
I'm not saying Lemmy (and the greater Fediverse) can't improve, but it's clear that the biggest barrier for most people is the decentralized aspect itself -- the core of the Fediverse -- which is something one shouldn't really "hide".
As long as the state of social media usership demands centralized practices, then the Fediverse will forever be at a disadvantage in gaining mass adoption.
What I don’t get is why not pretend it’s centralized and just recommend a server when you introduce someone to lemmy instead of trying to teach them?
Oh you want an alternative to Reddit, here, go to lemmy.ca since your Canadian.
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Every other post is some worldist idiot whining about ml
I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about.
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Um… okay, if the fairly mainstream for our demographic politics here repels certain people, good.
Especially because most users respond to this with “good.”
good.
Your comedic timing is impeccable.
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Shut down as in someone shut down the website or people telling you that the idea is trash?
Shut down as in 'that's a terrible idea for the fediverse'
If it was public & randomly sorted to the fediverse Lemmy servers, I don't see how it would be an issue
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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.
Is there any way to set one up that protects the anonymity of the people involved (where even the organizers don't know each other's real names) for opsec purposes?
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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
Honestly, joining a community just for the type of content they have or what they filter is useless. Best approach for me is to have access to everything and then filter what you don't like by yourself.
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Lemmy UX is identical to old Reddit. Come on.
Am used to New Reddit UX (2020-2022ish) but i still like this tbh.
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In the early years fo Reddit, those wouldn't exist either. You have to start with bigger groups (NFL, NHL, etc) and split them if they ever get big enough.
Even the NFL one, the front page of posts the most comments is 10.
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Even the NFL one, the front page of posts the most comments is 10.
Discoverability is a serious issue on Lemmy. I'd wager there's a shitload of people here interested in the big US sports, but unless you know where the community is (and there's often multiple, and sometimes on instances you're not linked to), you're not going to see it.
There's just not enough users for any algorithm pushing of obscure communities you might be interested in either.
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Discoverability is a serious issue on Lemmy. I'd wager there's a shitload of people here interested in the big US sports, but unless you know where the community is (and there's often multiple, and sometimes on instances you're not linked to), you're not going to see it.
There's just not enough users for any algorithm pushing of obscure communities you might be interested in either.
[email protected] had a thread about sport communities recently
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Well the only way to change that is to engage with those communities and provide content. Ofc. community building isnt easy.
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Even the NFL one, the front page of posts the most comments is 10.
[email protected] had a thread about sport communities recently
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I consider myself an idiot when it comes to this, but even I had zero issues. Went to Lemmy, joined .zip because it sounded cool and started browsing All to discover other communities (same as Reddit). If it had more steps to that then I would’ve done that too because i acknowledge that Reddit is going to shit and I am committed to my principles.
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Exactly it seems most people here still didn't realize that this is an open source project run by volunteers, not a corporation with countless employees and a profit motive. If people want something to get done then it's best they start doing it themselves.
tbf a lot of people here don't know how to code, or even where to start if they do
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I'm certain those replies are in bad faith to discourage people from leaving reddit. The first one is obvious for your aforemention reason. The second one. I mean the internet has been around for decades. People haven't suddenly forgot how to use it. Even normies have been able to figure out how to click a server. They're fomenting lazy inertia.
"retention bots" of some description wouldn't surprise me in the slightest..
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From everyone looking in: what the fuck is, ok, was Hexbear, why should I care and wtf can't I read anything from that place.
Same with registration, instances, etc. It's explained nowhere where how and why and i never have found a complete index with instances and communities.
I only can use lemmy because of sync. Yes, I'm also a reddit refugee.
they're a group of early reddit refugees from when /r/chapotraphouse got banned on Reddit for celebrating John Brown and the death of slave owners. They set themselves up a few years before the mass migrations from the Reddit API debacle, and over time they cultivated a distinctly uncompromising (and at times inscrutable) culture that heavily moderates the slightest hint of Western chauvinism, transphobia, and anti-vegan sentiments.
However, they also despise what they consider the farcical nature of Reddit style civility, and combined with disabling downvotes to force people to vocalize their disagreements, they also have the tendency to dogpile on people that aren't perceived to be acting in good faith.
The biggest conflict with other instances is their third-worldist oriented strain of Marxism-Leninism which has a more accepting view of "AES" (Actually Existing Socialism i.e. China, Cuba, USSR, etc) that leads them to conclusions that critically favor actions by non-socialist states (Russia, Sahel States, Yemen, etc) which undermine the United States/Western hegemony.
When they updated their code to be compatible with federation, their extremely active users clashed pretty hard with the more liberal tide of recent Reddit migrants so the generalist Lemmy instances decided to just defederate from them.
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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?
Oh so we badmouthing & smearing the Fediverse huh.
Ok let's ask them what counts as a "Good UI/UX"
& "Endless wars" ? Really ? -
We have a slight disadvantage in that regard yes, but I know we can get to a UX comparable to Bluesky and Reddit.
There just doesn't seem to be much focus on it, I feel setting good defaults will solve most of these issues.
Lemmy is nice for me now, but it took a lot of effort finding the settings and UI that I like, people will give up long before that.
See, I just use Thunder client and the defaults are x1000 times better than the official reddit app.
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I know when I say something inflammatory the response I will get, but I don't let it stop me from changing my view, and I intend to converse to further share and understand information.
I'm an asshole, not a hypocrite.
That will be for the Lemmy-folks to judge
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I’m working on a lemmy app. Will be UI focused!
Good luck & we'll be waiting
