Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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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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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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OK but that's still no explanation. I want to understand the problem deeper than "it's bad".
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Explain what exactly?
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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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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.
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How old are you, out of interest? Your posts in your similar thread about default viewing experience makes it seem like you want an Instagram-style image browser rather than the link aggregator which Reddit and Lemmy actually are.
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Preemptively defederating from Threads was widely discussed in a lot of places.
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Being able to just browse without signup and see largely federated content would pull in a lot of people. I am new to federated concepts, but would a generic, non-profit "home page" that's browseable without signup is possible? Apps like Voyager could dump newbies into that until they want to post/interact?
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People need to stop sending people to "join ___" sites. I get why they are, or at least were, necessary, but they're totally superfluous when users are making recommendations to other users.
Just recommend a website for them to join. Word of mouth + systematized signup makes zero sense.
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Exactly this - Join-Lemmy.org has some (minor) UI and text issues. I'm also not quite happy about the sorting of the instances and the selection there. If f.e. you chose "General -> English" during onboarding, you get this screen here:
Hexbear? Some random 11 user instance from finland? Lemmy.world nowhere to be seen? They are randomizing the instances, which kind of makes sense to prevent the bigger ones from growing even more, but which might confuse new users.
But those are minor UI quirks that can be solved. All those reddit couch warriors that claim that everything should be completely redone exactly how they want it to be are insane. Normal users are able to understand the concept of instances.
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I’m on three different instances and the sort by All-hot feed is nearly identical.
I’m not on Beehaw or Hexbear, but those instances make it pretty well known they block a lot of other instances.
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Joining is a bad experience. "Please commit now to a server on this service you know nothing about... Then you can try it out!" I understand the concept of decentralization, but it's ass-backwards...
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Been using Lemmy for a couple of years, not seen this once.
Also, the ux is pretty much the same as Reddit.
These people are just stakeholders in Reddit. They are afraid of change, or losing any rep they have. They sit on a pile of useless upvotes.
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Honestly, I think federation being (mostly) invisible is actually part of the problem. Trying to make these spaces look like something they're not makes people believe they work in a way that they don't. It makes "Lemmy" look like wish-dot-com Reddit, and Mastodon look like temu Twitter.
This is all something new. This is a thousand Reddits, where you can see over the fence at what each other Reddit is talking about. It's ten-thousand Twitters, where you can talk to people on other Twitters.
If you could post on Facebook articles from Twitter, people would get that maybe they don't see every single comment, or every single Facebook article all of the time. This would be understood. Twitter and Facebook look like, and are discussed as if, they're two totally different websites. The same would be true of AVForums and CivicForums, if they could cross-post.
But fediverse platforms go out of their way to hide what they are, and to strip each website of its identity. And that seems wildly fucked up to me.
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When half the posts in your feed are "X instance bad" people get just tired and go out.
It has happened to me sometimes a meaningful part of my feed was just people brigading about some instance they don't like. It's ridiculous.
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Really early on like right after the API fuckfest, there was a large influx of users who picked servers based on whatever. As a result, servers defederated and there was a lot of drama as a result.
Though that said I haven't heard much about defederating in some time.
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You did it, you saved Lemmy
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That happened to me in the reddit exodus, I switched to Lemmy and faced a lot of analysis paralysis, ended up in Lemmy.world out of spite and then I regretted my decision.
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The analysis paralysis of having to pick an instance is definitely the biggest hurdle in my opinion. I don't think a read-only instance is the solution though, at least not one that requires registration. That just adds another step, which I think would further confuse people. The simplest way to onboard new people is to just shove them onto the biggest instance, but I know that kind of goes against the ideology and creed of the fediverse. There were endless debates about it during the Reddit exodus of 2023.
