Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
-
Sure. You complained about that opinion, but it doesn't mean I can't hold that opinion. I don't agree with your observations or conclusions. We don't need more dimwit asshole conservatives here, if that's what you mean by 'wider audience'. That group already whines that Reddit is too leftist for them. I don't really agree that Lemmy is more extreme in that regard, other than specific instances like .ml or grad. The politics I see here are not more extreme and I don't find the user base 'repellant' at all, and I hold fairly typical US left views (would like more socialism, believe in human rights, universal healthcare, oppose racism, etc).
-
Then I'll just quote it directly:
"Here’s what all these complaints about federation choices reminds me of: every job I’ve ever had, new people get hired from time to time. What do they do? Long before they’ve had any time to get any training or learn how things work to maybe get a better understanding of why some things are done the way they are - day one, they start complaining about all kinds of little things, waxing fantastical about how they’d do things differently. Same energy.
Nothing is perfect, and maybe things can be improved in a number of ways as time goes on. But also everything has a learning curve, so maybe try learning that curve before making demands about getting rid of the core elements that make federation what they are."
That's the thing: no matter how well a system is designed, there will always be a subset of people who find it confusing and frustrating. I've seen Facebook users who refuse to touch reddit because it makes no sense to them. People who never "got" Twitter. Hell, I love digging into operating system environments and learning how they work, and even I ragequit Apple devices every time I touch them - systems whose design is the most celebrated in the tech world.
Learning new things is just uncomfortable, and there will always be people who refuse to do it.
But the fediverse is here, and despite your gatekeeping attitude about it "never being adopted by the masses" because it doesn't follow your personal views; it is growing just fine. New users come and go every day. New systems get federated regularly. Maybe a different reddit clone than lemmy will prove to be the most favored one? Who knows. But it's doing just fine, one day at a time. And it's open-source, so if you don't like it, then code something about it.
-
I've used Voyager before and while it comes close, unless they changed how the app operates, I don't think that app fits the description that I'm asking for.
The entire issue with Lemmy is the Federation aspect of it, while it's a good thing to have it's way too confusing for the everyday person. For example I use eternity, the only layout that remotely looks decent in my opinion. It worked similar to Voyager where when you open it for the first time it brought you to an instance and then when you went to make an account it asked you which instance you wanted to make the account on. That right there is going to turn away a good 30 to 40% of the people looking. I know it almost turned me away.
For the point of responding to this comment I reinstalled Voyager, I'm going to portray my experience from someone who doesn't have experience with the fediverse. If you don't wish to see the narration, you can skip the spoiler
Okay cool I see a bunch of posts, I expect this lem.ee thing is the program oh fun they have Politics on the front page I thought I was trying to avoid that but okay there are some memes here that are pretty cool, let me try to like one,
oh I need an account yeah that makes sense, neat they have a learn more button(most people likely won't click this btw) okay an entire page explaining that the programs like an email client, how is up voting content like receiving emails
(personally think they should have used subscribe/follow for that imo)Okay cool I think I get it let me just use the default instance, let me just skip past all of this pointless TOS stuff, "please write I accept acknowledging that you've read the rules in the sidebar on the front page." uhh Sidebar? Well I don't know how to get to that so let me try the next instance, lemmy.world sounds good. and that one is a 1 2 3 process(if email verification works)
From here they have a functioning account but the app has failed to tell them the core aspects of what federation is, they've failed to explain what defederation is, they failed to explain what the repercussions of choosing an instance does, it's only explained that Lemmy is like email, and to the everyday user, email is identical across all providers, users very rarely if at all have an email provider actively block an email server because they don't agree with what's going on there. For example in the case of LW by choosing that platform you're actively removing yourself from anything that's against their mentalities such as the piracy community, you're also subjecting yourself to a somewhat heavy moderation style instance and also subjecting yourself to hatred in the community without actually realizing you're doing so. You won't know this tell you get told by a user (and you WILL get told by a user).
This could be avoided by having a integration with fediseer or being able to integrate with the instances Blacklist so you can see what is blocked. Or even just a link to their rules would be amazing.
That's my main annoyance in current mobile apps, they are only decent for established fediversers. Most people would have left second or third message into my experience and just gone back to other platforms
-
If I understand the way the Fediverse works correctly, global content viewed by members of an instance gets cached on that instance. So even though this thread is "on" lemmy.world, because I'm participating here there's also a copy on sh.itjust.works and that copy gets passed to me.
Among the instances sh.itjust.works is defederated from, there's one called "rape.pet". I'm okay with The_Dude saying "No, you can't get there from here" to shit like that.
-
While I understand and largely agree with your point, I think it's worthwhile to question whether it's reasonable that this is the way people expect the Internet to work.
Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack, so that unless you're somewhat tech-savvy, you can't tell the concept of app apart from the concept of server. Not unlike how Android and iOS have been obscuring many basics of the system to the point that some people don't even know what a filesystem is.
Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved, rather than just "the way things work" and that we need to cather to it. Mostly because FOSS services will always, invariably, struggle to adapt to a conception of the internet optimized for consumption and nothing else.
I agree that people nowadays might struggle to understand what, for instance, a third-party app is, but I also think it's too an unreasonably low bar to just let it be, and have FOSS forever playing acrobatics to somehow adapt to it.
Whether Lemmy should be the one leading this struggle is a whole another argument lol. Somehow forcing people to understand this with Lemmy in particular, without changing anything of the larger culture, will just cause people to not use Lemmy outright.
But this cannot be the way it works. Everyone using the internet needs some bare minimum tech literacy.
-
Championing for accessibility is the opposite of gatekeeping, no? And coding doesn't solve everything. At the moment, the perfect Lemmy instance could be coded and nobody might find it given the plethora of existing ones. Anyway, we disagree and that's okay.
-
No it's not. It can be relative to anywhere. If drag's on the left side of a room, then the center of the room is to the right.
-
-7 and -9 are both numbers… but none of them are at zero or above. They are both negative, just by varying degrees.
Are you referring to yourself as “drag” or is that a typo?
-
Directions do not have an absolute reference point. There is no center of the universe. Numbers do. That's why numbers aren't like directions. Don't use numbers as an example when numbers have something directions don't.
-
I was trying to be analogous to help you understand… either you don’t want to understand or you’re not willing to understand or… there’s something else going on here.
-
You chose a bad analogy because you don't understand. That's what's going on here. You think the overton window isn't culturally relative
-
So you can understand up or down but struggle with left and right?
-
ok, yeah, kinda hard to argue with that. Not sure what a good middle ground would be.
-
The very best we can do is have vigilant grown adults in charge. We can likely agree that child bestiality or other word combinations that feel illegal to even type should be isolated, but on the spectrum of "Hitler was right" "Mao was right" "Che was right" "Washington was right" do you say "Nope we don't accept that kind of shit around here?" There are people who will draw the line in the same place from either side of it. Like I say, that line is somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there and that's not a unique problem to the Fediverse; it's a problem with humans, and I don't think you can solve it, only sidestep it through totalitarianism.
-
Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack,
I fully agree here. Whatever software they have developed, is not rocket science, and mostly based off of existing standards.
Gmail, Outlook, etc... just a bunch of *DAV servers on top of an emailing service, paired with some SSO. Same goes for Reddit/X/FB. A simple DB just storing some info and doing some fancy sorting based on that info.
Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved
Yes!
But, on the other hand it's a two-fold sword.
Corps are making money off of peoples lack of knowledge, and this has been the way of how "offering a service" is being done probably since human history... and yes, it pisses me off as well, especially when it comes to human health and nutrition, etc...
But....
Say, you hire contract workers, to build a house, bc. you don't know how to do it yourself. Then you need to hire someone else to approve the quality of the work that's been done, since again... you lack the knowledge. After you've moved in, something breaks, again... you hire someone to fix it.
Now, at what point do you start learning about all the components involved in a built house? electricity, plumbering, walls, etc... and most importantly, do you even care in learning so or not?
And some people, just don't care. They simply don't. Even if the concept of a topic is very easy to grasp, they simply lack the interest in knowing about how it works.
-
Yes! I as well started my Lemmy journey on kbin first.
Back when the API changes were introduced in Reddit, everyone on Reddit kept about lemmy.
Then, in the comments you read stuff like "Lemmy are a bunch of tankies, kbin is better, yada yada"...
Great, now you're already torn between two sides, without even knowing about the basic concepts of how they both work.
You then go to one Lemmy server, and see how bad the UI is, then you check out kbin, and it feels nice.
Well, and the rest is history...
-
Say you hire a company to build a house. You don't have the skills or the know-to, but at some point, you'll have to deal with some inevitable aspects of building a house, if only to discuss them with the workers. Say they "force" you to deal with plumbing, for example by including it in the budget. Imagine if you not only don't know how plumbing works, but also what plumbing is. Maybe you've never had to think about it before. What would you do? Would you go to another company that doesn't force you to deal with it, perhaps by not even providing it in the first place?
Say for the sake of argument that this becomes a generalized problem, and companies use it as an excuse to no longer provide plumbing in new houses, as a cost-saving measure. Most people don't seem to care. Over 10 years pass by, and people have gotten used to expect not having running water at home. "It sucks, but that's the way it is I guess".
Now, a community-driven initiative arises to build cheaper houses, complete with running water. Can you imagine most people refusing participating, because building a house with running water implies having to know that plumbing supplies water? That the mere thought of it is already too complicated, and that maybe having fresh water at home is only for people whose special interest is plumbing?
You need some elementary knowledge on things, if only to exist in the world. The Fediverse, and I mean this wholeheartedly, is not that complicated once you grasp the most basic concepts of the internet.
While I won't deny outright that open-source devs most of the time don't think about making their software accessible to the wider public, and that some aspects of decentralized social media still have to be ironed out (duplicated communities on Lemmy are a pet-peeve of mine); these issues are often heavily blown out of proportion. Besides people honestly not understanding some concepts, I think there is also some deliberate anti-intellectualism going on with this topic in particular. People who spend their afternoons troubleshooting Windows just so that their computer games run at 60 FPS suddenly don't know what a website is when Mastodon is mentioned.
I'm pretty certain that this "Fediverse is too complicated" mantra would not have worked at all before 2010.
-
The whole process was a massive time and energy drain in the end with no benefit. I don't think anyone with a life would pursue something like this any further. I trialled-and-errored my way to Lemmy.world while I was out of work. Otherwise I'd still be on Reddit.
-
It's depressing how many top level comments or replies are about how people like that there is a technical barrier gatekeeping lemmy. Are yall actually leftists or do you just pretend to be while worshipping your own version of social hierarchy in which us nerds are on top?
-
The idea that intelligence has no impact on computer skills and the ability to quickly learn computer skills is magical thinking. Intelligence differences are real and the solution is to make easy explanation to help people learn. I am not among the most intelligent people on Lemmy, the intelligence of the average Lemmy person probably at least an IQ above 115. It's not about elitism, it's about accessibility. I have terrible coordination. If someone tries to teach me advanced tennis, it would be bad, but if someone recognizes my coordination limits and is like, the goal is to just hit the ball once, then perhaps I have fun with tennis.
