Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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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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Oh so we badmouthing & smearing the Fediverse huh.
Ok let's ask them what counts as a "Good UI/UX"
& "Endless wars" ? Really ? -
See, I just use Thunder client and the defaults are x1000 times better than the official reddit app.
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That will be for the Lemmy-folks to judge
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Good luck & we'll be waiting
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Reading these comments I feel a sense of dread. You are all experiencing survivor bias. Initially when I ran into barriers I gave up for like a year before bothering to try Lemmy again.
If you don't want Lemmy to serve as an actual counter to corporate controlled social media if it means letting in "normies" then you are content with corporate controlled social media continuing to dominate our lives. Which sounds about right for humanity. The smugness is vile.
Just bring on the vacuum decay event already.
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How far is "too far left" ?
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Do you know why? It sounds to me like a great addition to the fediverse.
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Who cares? If someone can't figure out how to join a server, then I don't want them here. If people think that reddit has some amazing UX, then I don't want them here.
The post about Lemmy has 500 upvotes while the crybaby replies only have like 100.
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I don't want anyone staying on Reddit tbh
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Better UX than Reddit, they even point out that it’s like old.reddit instead of the trash UX they have now
It’s just dismissive to get people to agree without looking
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Because email federation is inherent to everyone's understanding of how that service works. And perhaps more importantly, email "instances" are run by corporations. Laymen are not signing up on a "server" or "instance," they're signing up for Google, Apple, or Microsoft - the service they get aligns to a company that provides it. Nearly every single service that anyone has ever signed up for online has followed the same essential process: go to fixed url, create id and password, gain access.
It's easy to underestimate, especially in communities like this, how enigmatic the entire infrastructure of the internet is to the general population. Think of those videos where people are asked what "the cloud" is: they pause and ponder and then guess "satellites?" because they've never even wondered about it. I'm guessing that for many people, something like Twitter is just something that lives in their app store that they can choose to "enable" on their phone by installing it.
People know that software is "made up of code," but they don't understand what that means. The idea that an "application" is a collection of services run by code, that there are app servers and web servers, that there are backends and frontends, is completely unknown to (I'd guess) a significant majority of people. And if someone doesn't understand that, it's honestly near impossible to understand what anything in the fediverse is.
And most importantly: this is not any user's fault. IT and the Internet developed so quickly, and it was made so seamlessly accessible by corporations who at first just wanted their services to be adopted, and then wanted everything even more deliberately opaque so those users were more likely to feel locked in and dependent while the services themselves tail-spun in degradation.
We need more, and more accessible, and friendlier, tech literacy in general. The complexity of our world is running away from us ("I have a foreboding [of a time...] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues" - Carl Sagan) and we simply can't deeply understand many of the things that directly impact us. But because of its ubiquity, IT may be the best chance people have of getting better at understanding.
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First of all, 99% of people don't have the technical expertise to self host Lemmy, and that's who we are talking about in this thread.
Secondly, there are very significant benefits to using a well established server versus self hosting.
The most obvious perk is having a built-in community to interact with and learn from.But more importantly, more established servers will already be subscribed to many of the major communities, making the task of finding and browsing remote communities that much easier. Consider this:
Your local version of c/science_memes only has ~200 posts and 1.2k comments. Also, many of the older posts didn't seem to federate the comments or upvotes. This is because your server only recently subscribed to that community, and federation doesn't occur retroactively.
The sh.itjust.works version of the community has 3.9k posts and 94k comments, because we have been subscribed since the community started.
The main version actually has 3.92k posts and 99.6k comments. Most of the missing comments on the SJW version are likely from lemmygrad and hexbear users, who are defederated by SJW but not by mander.xyz. This is also another major consideration about self hosting vs. joining a larger server: defederations. Some people will see predetermined defederations as a pro while others will consider it a con (also depending on which servers are defederated). The main thing is that people have options that work for them.
Funnily enough, the communick version is majorly fucked up, not sure why that is.
At this point I'm just getting curious, so I checked the lemmy.myserv.one version as well, and it's got an impressive 3.84k posts and 98.2k comments.
Might as well try it for c/greentext as well.
- Main community - 1.22k posts / 52.6k comments
- is.hardlywork.ing version - 501 posts / 901 comments
- communick.news version - 1.1k posts / 23k comments
- lemmy.myserv.one - 200 posts / 15 comments (I guess I never subscribed to that community on this account? Kinda weird)
- mander.xyz - 1.22k posts / 52.9k comments (not sure how it has more comments than the main version, someone should look into that)
So yeah, it's not quite as simple as you make it seem. Hopefully someday Lemmy will integrate the ability to federate communities retroactively as some kind of option. Because I think that was more of a design choice than anything, technically it should be possible to toggle a setting and get your instance to download all of the posts and comments from a remote community, even from before you subscribed.
And I feel like without having access to all of the old posts and comments that we have built up over the past couple years, content on Lemmy probably feels a lot more sparse for a new user. Personally, I have always enjoyed sorting by top posts of all time in various communities, both on reddit and now on Lemmy. Even if you've been subscribed to the community the whole time, you tend to miss out on some great posts if you only ever sort by new or hot.
And btw, I luckily have a free lifetime subscription to the communick Lemmy server because they did a promotion back in the day.
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You're confusing UX with UI. UX = user experience, the entire experience, UI = the interface.
UX is the entire user experience, and for example for joining reddit, you go to reddit.com and join.
For lemmy you learn there are dozens of large instances, with intricate politics between them and if you join the wrong one everyone thinks you're a tankie....That's terrible and i can imagine people are put off by it.
The interface of lemmy itself is indeed ok, and is close to old reddit, which at least the people here prefer.
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I do the same on mobile
but I think once people do understand federation and why its actually a very good idea they would too - but thats not going to be true of the majority - certainly not before they use a federated service. -
When it comes to software things, I do tend to err on the side of supporting new users - I'll be the first to argue that a person should not have to learn how to use the terminal in order to use Linux.
That said, this situation is honestly bewildering to me. I cannot fathom how the idea of having choices could be considered, let alone by so many people to even make this into a controversy, to be bad design. That's the very thing that makes federation great.
You're all seriously overthinking this. Just look at a few of the most populated sites, and pick one that looks good. The choice makes 95% no difference in practice because on most instances you're going to see all the same content as soon as you press the All button anyway.
One thing I can imagine that would make the experience better, is maybe if there was a one-click way to join or migrate to another lemmy instance, using an existing login. Personally I don't think it's a big deal to just quickly sign up for a new instance if I want to. But I did see that Pixelfed has the option of signing on by using a Mastodon account. So maybe something like that can help?
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They didn’t, they signed up for gmail.
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But that's not great. It's great if you're not interested in a social networking forum and want a meme feed sure but I don't. I want people, I want the damaged ego people and I want to ask and talk to them about how they ended up like that
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For the majority of commenters: UX is not UI.
The poor UX experience is the research a person has to do before they can even participate. You need to have a basic understanding of how the network works, and then you have to shop around for a server.
It’s enough friction to prevent people from on-boarding and that’s not good for a platform that needs people to be valuable.
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I doubt they even know there's anything other than gmail.
