Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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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.
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Do we? I was never asked.
The community as it is right now, feels like the early days of Reddit and Slashdot. I really don't mind that slight speed bump.
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That's fair I guess. I remember that. That was around the same time as well, so someone registered to say Beehaw or Hexbear during the Threads fediverse announcement period would probably get the idea that federation wars is all that's going, at least if they stopped visiting Lemmy shortly thereafter.
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How old are you?
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Just recommend a website for them to join.
But the crux is which one do you recommend? We don't want to send everyone to the same instance otherwise it'll end up becoming dominant (see Lemmy World).
Ideally we shouldn't need to go through this motion of trying to work out which instance to choose or recommend one for them, they should be able to do that themselves after getting their feet wet.
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Two things can be true at the same time.
Yes reddit doesn't care about their users.
But also the old reddit is worse for the vast majority of people
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Exactly.
UX is like a Joke, if you need to explain it to someone it's bad UX
