Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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Yes. Lemmy is not friendly for the "average" user. We could come up with a list of severs with pros and cons to them and then people would feel more comfortable. I came here the moment reddit killed the API and I was so confused. Federated anything meant nothing to me and I discovered lemmy.world so that's just what I joined. LOL I still don't know the difference between servers.
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LEMMY IS FUN PLEASE
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imo this friction will erode as larger instances come into play; people will join a large, main instance without even knowing of the others, and-- if they have a problem with the instance they joined-- they'll find they can easily jump ship there.
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Confusing as in why is it so prominent for something that doesn't matter at all. Why is it separate if its the same damn thing except for the link
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Because you have to make a choice. If you go to a restaurant and say "I'd like a meal, please" they'll make you choose one from the menu. It doesn't matter to them which one you choose, you just have to choose.
In this case, some Lemmy instance needs to be the one where you sign in. Most of them probably don't care if you choose them or not. But, if you want to use Lemmy, at some point you have to make a choice.
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It would be nice if I could use (my name)@(mydomain) and just point (mydomain) at whichever public instance, without having to spool up my own instance.
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It's not empathetic. It just tries to understand human psychology well enough to manipulate consumer choices for more profits. If you want something on that philosophy, that's what reddit is already for.
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And yet here you are.
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Okay I see now, that's a good deal of nuance.
One more bad analogy, it's like browsing private video game servers.
There's several websites that host lists of Minecraft Servers, some are hidden from those lists due to various reasons.
A federated video game like VR Chat or Minecraft would be incredible. You could probably do that last one with a server plugin.
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It should have an account creation process like those old RPGs where it asks a series of questions then says, “we recommend this server: <blah>. It is <one short sentence about its content>” then has click next to proceed or click “I want to choose another server” to just get a list.
1-hate, 5-love
Do you like capitalism?
Do you like tech?
Do you like sports?
Would you prefer a large server?
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Base privacy rules of federation. The main difference in sign ups seems to be privacy policy. Or some filter on sign up that isn’t choose an instance but a filter that “finds you an instance.”
“Do you want to provide an email address?”
“Do you want x, y, z?”
Filter down to a single instance or if multiple just randomize what instance you toss them to. Just don’t make it a decision. When they are finished signing up send them a note that’s says “you can always change instances by going to _____ link or something to make account or change instances ____”
It’s really not complex but it’s the “feel” of complexity. For instance I froze a bit because some instances had no privacy policy, some said oh yeah we spy on you, some said no email needed just sign up… just get rid of that deer in the headlights moment, or standard privacy rules for federation in the “main” group.
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I work in IT so this is more familiar to me than it would be to the avg person.
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And? The tech bros currently ransacking the federal government also work in IT.
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@[email protected] commented above with a good experience of why it's a crappy idea (I was thinking a randomzier would be good too.
I just clicked the first option it showed, which (for me) was a non-English instance. The second option was that LGBT-focused instance that defederated with lemmy.world a few months ago. Of course I didn’t know anything about either community so I just picked randomly.
I could see that happening a lot. I've messed with other randomizing systems and sometimes you forget how many niche or non matching picks can pop up when you really look at it. Even a 10% match with language barriers wouldn't be good for a reliable system of placement.
I also don't like the "what harry potter house" do you belong to quiz stuff or anything that asks to crawl or input your data (no thank you). Definitely more complicated than I thought.
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I disagree that this is a concern. If you are already exaggerating about federation wars, chances are you already tried lemmy and know a good bit about selecting instances. The average user will not care as much as you do.
The average user will go to join-lemmy site, will not care at all about the different instances and likely choose the biggest one or first one they see. None of them will think "oh no this one is involved in federation wars" because thats not something you find out before knowing some about the fediverse.
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The biggest advantage of federated social media is that there's multiple servers. I know it can be a rough point for new users, but most people can just join whatever the largest server is and they'll be perfectly fine. You need to pick a server because lemmy isn't one website, and it shouldn't be one website. People should be able to host an instance if they disagree with another one's moderation/rules, and spreading the load across many servers helps to prevent large scale downtime when servers go down.
All of these advantages can coexist with new users just being pointed to lemmy.world. -
whatever, just make a lemmy app that defaults to lemmy.world i guess
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The average user will go to join Lemmy and abort, because they can't grasp the idea that joining one server gets them into other servers. They worry about server selection, have analysis paralysis, and nope out. That's why they're asking for a bluesky reddit and not a mastodon reddit.
Normie's want centralization because they don't understand how else it can work and while some can learn and have it explained many will give up before giving it a chance.
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Bad UX isn't keeping most people away from Lemmy. Not being able to give up their addiction to Reddit is what's keeping them from Lemmy. There's a lot of people who will complain about the shitty things billionaires and tech companies and politicians do to them, but aren't willing to lift a finger to change things.
You're never going to bring those people to Lemmy unless Reddit shuts down and you develop an algorithm to spoon feed them whatever they want to feed their doomscrolling habit. Lemmy is better off without them.
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The average user that will get to join-lemmy will GTFO.
The average user gets their Google account by opening their device and going step by step with nice animations.
Find a person that already has an apartment, bills, work, relationship and isn't working in tech.
A. Ask him to join lemmy. Ask after a month if it happened (spoiler, it didn't).
B. Help him open an account, check after he month if he kept it.
