Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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The core issue is none of my hobbies exist on Lemmy. I tried really hard to populate those instances but there were just 3 (three) people engaging in discussions. What even is the point?
Three is better than none. as long as the community exist and has some kind of activity even one post a month with three comments, you are doing your part to create a viable home for those who share your niche interest. In three months you might get up to 6 people, in 9 months 10, one year later 15. Its difficult going from passive consumer to one of the few active posters but you truly are adding value to the space just by trying.
Lemmy users like to present lemmy vs reddit usage as all or nothing, its not. Realistically you still use reddit for the niche communities that arent getting much interaction here. I do for locallama and dynavap. But ideally you cross post to the lemmy communities to add content here too so that those like you have a better chance to find a home.
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This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
I was on Sync for Reddit before going here, and checked out Lemmy as the devs switched platform. So the joke's on them, my UX is basically identical.
That said, sucks that people shy away because of complexity.
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Have you tried https://piefed.social/ ? Compatible with Lemmy (allows you to import your subscriptions list actually) and with a different approach: https://join.piefed.social/blog/
I dont know what you are talking about. What subscriptions am i adding to where?
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This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
Hot take - I don't blame them. The who's federated with who and who can see what, and how it works is confusing as absolute fuck and extremely poorly explained.
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Don't over think it, the people who want to be here will be.
Unpopular opinion maybe but I like Lemmy and lemmy users and I'm glad that we're a bit different from Reddit. At least in my experience it feels a bit different.
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This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
Wait wait wait... This implies people like new reddit... That shit makes my eyes bleed wtf
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Unless we fix the UX problems in Lemmy, a Bluesky-like alternative of reddit is going to pop up, and overtake Lemmy, like what happened with Mastadon
It's a solved problem. Check out phtn.app and vger.app also Alexandrite, Next and Tesseract. Like the problem is solved 5 times over.
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Why is “drama” on Lemmy always highly exaggerated by people?
“Endless wars of who federates with who”. What is that person even talking about and who the fuck would even care as a normal user?
Not necessailly federation, but I've seen a lot of people prejudge commenters for what instance they're a part of, most commonly calling people from .ml or hexbear tankies just for being on .ml or hexbear. It gets old really quickly.
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It’s why my less “tech savvy” friends won’t join. They don’t understand what federation is, and No they don’t want to take 2 minutes to learn.
It’s annoying, but it’s reality. People don’t understand the whole different servers thing, federation, and how to pick one.
I realize marketing isn’t a strong suit (nor should it be), but I’m proposing two solutions (well maybe not solutions, but something to help):
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A quick animated video showing the benefits of Lemmy and how this all works (if it hasn’t already been done yet)
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A service that basically simplifies and centralizes the signup process to one screen. During server selection, users can see the most populated servers and click on them to learn the specific rules for the server, etc.
Idk, maybe we already have all this…or this is just complicating the issue. Or maybe we only want people willing to take 2 minutes to learn about how it all works. Tbh that’s a pretty good natural filter for the types of users I want to be interacting and discussing with.
They don’t understand what federation is
They can't use email..?
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Nothing, this seems like a good thing, I don't want them here if they literally cannot even comprehend the concept of different servers, though somehow no one has this issue with discord even though it's dogshit, almost as if they just yearn for the corporate boot.
Or even just accepting a default, or a randomly assigned one.
There was something in retail I learned. There are people who will come in on sale days, and they will demand perfect customer service, and demand the lowest prices, and ask for more sales and bring coupons, all while talking about how they spend so much money there and that they're so loyal. Then they'll leave and you'll never see them again
You can spend time and effort with them, the ones who only care about the cheapest place, or you can spend time with the customers who are actually there regularly. The ones who get to know your names, who are loyal, or enjoy a sale sure but also will be there even when there isn't one.
I don't want to attract users simply because reddit bad, and cater our experience for people who can't bother to learn just the basic tenant of the fediverse. I want to cater our experiences for those who are here daily, and the ones who are genuinely interested. It's the longer slower approach, but we'll stay more true to our goals
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This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
Using Boost for Lemmy and it's almost like I never switched.
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Or even just accepting a default, or a randomly assigned one.
There was something in retail I learned. There are people who will come in on sale days, and they will demand perfect customer service, and demand the lowest prices, and ask for more sales and bring coupons, all while talking about how they spend so much money there and that they're so loyal. Then they'll leave and you'll never see them again
You can spend time and effort with them, the ones who only care about the cheapest place, or you can spend time with the customers who are actually there regularly. The ones who get to know your names, who are loyal, or enjoy a sale sure but also will be there even when there isn't one.
I don't want to attract users simply because reddit bad, and cater our experience for people who can't bother to learn just the basic tenant of the fediverse. I want to cater our experiences for those who are here daily, and the ones who are genuinely interested. It's the longer slower approach, but we'll stay more true to our goals
Nice comparison
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They don’t understand what federation is
They can't use email..?
Haha that’s very true. Same concept as signing up for a specific email provider. Hadn’t really thought of that.
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I was on Sync for Reddit before going here, and checked out Lemmy as the devs switched platform. So the joke's on them, my UX is basically identical.
That said, sucks that people shy away because of complexity.
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Using Boost for Lemmy and it's almost like I never switched.
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The core issue is none of my hobbies exist on Lemmy. I tried really hard to populate those instances but there were just 3 (three) people engaging in discussions. What even is the point?
Which communities were those?
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This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s
That was Aol.
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I dont know what you are talking about. What subscriptions am i adding to where?
The communities you are subscribed too, which show up in your Subscribed feed.
Those can be imported into Piefed, maybe the transition easier.
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Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media (which Reddit is). Without attracting new users Lemmy will almost certainly perish. It's goal should be a low bar to onboard new social media users coming from places like Reddit, Facebook, X.
Saying "Not our problem" is a woefully shortsighted.
Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media
Lemmy is a protocol for networking individual privately hosted social media instances. It is not a panacea for corporate control of social media infrastructure. You're still hosting these sites on AWS / Azure / some other large corporately controlled private hardware setup. You're still securing the URL from a private DNS. You're still paying for these sites out of the surplus of a handful of wealth(ier) patrons and their friendly donors (or ending up like Hexbear.net, with a domain name up for grabs because it was mismanaged by part time broke amateurs).
Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.
There's not a lot we can do about it individually. I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP's image's "this is too weird and scary" attitude.
If popping into the Fediverse and just picking a Lemmy instance was as straightforward as selecting "Communities I'm interested in" on other bigger social media feeds, the onboarding would be smoother. But if you poke around and see people going whole hog frothing at the mouth "Everyone on <instance>.<whatever> is morally degenerate and has ruined the community at large!!!" reactionary in between instances, that's an immediate turn off that I don't think anyone within the Lemmy network knows how to deal with.
Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit, just ported into a more decentralized network. And it neglects the fundamentals of modern web hosting (we're all at the mercy of the IANA / Cloudflare, etc / the major hosting companies).
Lemmy is, itself, a shortsighted patch on a much larger and scarier problem. The instance infighting only reveals how shortsighted.
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This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
I found a beautiful web client for Lemmy that I wish was the default experience. It would surely help Lemmy in gaining popularity.
here's the link: https://phtn.app/
