Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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That's a pretty funny thing to say when talking about a platform explicitly designed to fill the same niche as reddit.
The call is coming from inside the house!
The self-selection of Lemmy vs Reddit users is an inherently stratifying medium. Lemmy is also distinctly left-leaning in a way that Reddit is not.
Having experienced several waves of Reddit absorbing Facebook exoduses, and the subsequent worsening of experience, I can only infer the same pattern will exist in Reddit slop migrating to Lemmy.
If anything, I'd prefer that entire crowd return to Facebook to bloviate their opinions and Boomerisms ad naseum.
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I think a lot of people that think the UX is different from reddit weren't on reddit 14 years ago when it did look very similar to this.
I barely remember reddit on PC. Except for people trying to convince bitcoin would be valuable - and me thinking they were foolish. I would have sold at $25, anyways.
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Pot, meet kettle.
I know when I say something inflammatory the response I will get, but I don't let it stop me from changing my view, and I intend to converse to further share and understand information.
I'm an asshole, not a hypocrite.
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What's most annoying is that for 95% of users, federation doesn't even matter. You just log on and use lemmy exactly like reddit. All feds are consolidated onto my front page anyway.
People make a big deal about it, it definitely intimidated me when I first logged up. It's one of the reasons I put off getting into lemmy for such a long time, and it's frustrating that in the end, it really makes no difference.
All is not consolidated, though. "All" is your local feed plus what is subscribed to by users on your instance. It isn't everything by default, afaik.
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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?
How can people figure out email, but lemmy is just too complicated?
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This I like, it solved many of the issues. I wish it was the default.
with was the default too.
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Lemmy UX is identical to old Reddit. Come on.
An improved version of old reddit with a good mobile view, which old reddit lacks.
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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?
Those comments are fairly meaningless. Federation wars? Where? There was some controversy like a year ago from why I recall and everyone has moved way on. I wouldn’t even consider that UX either.
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endless wars of who's federeated with who
i've been here for months and months, i might have seen this mentioned as an aside once or twice. but "endless wars"?
The first year after the api debacle in 2023 was rife with culture class of redditors tromping through anarchist and communist communities and instances and freaking the fuck out they're allowed to exist.
Those instances have resulted in defederations or there's been enough fatigue and migration that these days its really just down to like 3 chronically obsessed users variously spamming about it.
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The tough part for me is that the reason I use Reddit is for bullshitting with people about sports teams I like. Lets look at some of the communities here.
- Baltimore Orioles -- There's one on lemmy.world with 150 subscribers. The last post is from 4 months ago and it's a game thread posted by a bot with 0 comments. There's also one on fanaticus.social with the last post from 7 months ago.
- Carolina Panthers -- There's one on fanaticus.social with 3 subscribers.
- Miami Heat -- There's one on lemmy.world with 10 subscribers.
- Pittsburgh Penguins -- Again, lemmy.world with 11 subscribers.
I'd love to get off reddit but until there's actually people to talk with, this place is just never going to meet the needs of sports content that I use Reddit for. I had no interest in Bluesky until some people actually got on it as well. The Shutdown Fullcast for college football brought a bunch of people and fans there so it gave some utility to the site. Without utility, there's no reason to be here.
In the early years fo Reddit, those wouldn't exist either. You have to start with bigger groups (NFL, NHL, etc) and split them if they ever get big enough.
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If the miniscule effort of signing up for a platform keeps someone away, they probably wouldn't be a good community member anyway.
You don't even have to sign up to view posts or comments.
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Reddit ux is also ass. Only difference between reddit and lemmy is that the federation bit is extremely confusing and not intuitive.
Maybe I’m more tech oriented than many, but I don’t find federation confusing at all. I’ve never understood why it’s described that way.
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Those comments are fairly meaningless. Federation wars? Where? There was some controversy like a year ago from why I recall and everyone has moved way on. I wouldn’t even consider that UX either.
Every other post is some worldist idiot whining about ml
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IMHO, the UX is bad, but the user base is also repellant. It's further left than Reddit so most people who jump in bounce right off. That's going to be difficult to change organically. Especially because most users respond to this with "good." So there's definitely no appetite to appeal to a wider audience. I predict Lemmy will become increasingly ideologically partisan and isolated.
Um… okay, if the fairly mainstream for our demographic politics here repels certain people, good.
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99% of users are going to check out when you ask which server they want to join
So Lemmy is filtering out people who can’t take 5 minutes to understand a simple concept and make a decision?
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I think the irony here is that the user-friendliness experience of Bluesky stems from it being a centralized service (in practice). I seriously doubt most people who signed up for Bluesky even understand what "decentralized social media" means.
I'm not saying Lemmy (and the greater Fediverse) can't improve, but it's clear that the biggest barrier for most people is the decentralized aspect itself -- the core of the Fediverse -- which is something one shouldn't really "hide".
As long as the state of social media usership demands centralized practices, then the Fediverse will forever be at a disadvantage in gaining mass adoption.
What I don’t get is why not pretend it’s centralized and just recommend a server when you introduce someone to lemmy instead of trying to teach them?
Oh you want an alternative to Reddit, here, go to lemmy.ca since your Canadian.
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Every other post is some worldist idiot whining about ml
I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about.
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Um… okay, if the fairly mainstream for our demographic politics here repels certain people, good.
Especially because most users respond to this with “good.”
good.
Your comedic timing is impeccable.
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Shut down as in someone shut down the website or people telling you that the idea is trash?
Shut down as in 'that's a terrible idea for the fediverse'
If it was public & randomly sorted to the fediverse Lemmy servers, I don't see how it would be an issue
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People forget that user experience isn't just the stuff on the screen you interact with. There is a governance piece that is lacking in a lot of instances, and in the open source community as a whole. A lot of the successful projects out there are backed by some kind of foundation.
Take a look at the latest Hexbear drama. Some person out there owned the domain for their instance and let it expire. Now they are in a bidding war with a crypto site with a hexagon-related name. If they had formed some kind of organization or entity that registered the domain and owned the instance, this probably wouldn't have happened. Their users wouldn't get redirected to a domain auction site when trying to access the site. That's not an ideal user experience. It destroys trust.
SDF being a 501(c)(7) is one of the reasons that it's my home instance. For me, it provides a level of trust that an instance run by some random person on the internet doesn't. If there is a big federation/defederation debate, then it's really up to the membership to decide, and not a collection of admins or a single person getting the vibe of the users.
Another thing to remember is that Lemmy really shouldn't be competing against Reddit. The purpose of Reddit is to have the user generate content in order to keep the user's attention on the site so they can sell targeted advertisements. This is the basic business model for all of commercial social media. It has nothing to do with creating communities. That is secondary. If you want more people on Lemmy so that there is more content for you to consume, just stay on Reddit or TikTok. They need to sell ads in order to fund model training to keep your engagement up in order to sell more ads in order to provide quarterly growth to their shareholders. If you want more people on Lemmy because more brains mean better communities, then focus the communities.
The real opportunity for the fediverse is getting a lot of the existing non-profits, social organizations, and other types of communities to set up their own instances. This answers the “what instance do I join?” question by joining the instance associated with the community you're already involved in. Another reason I'm on SDF is retro computing. If you're really into your local makerspace, then you probably have a community ready to go for a Lemmy instance. If you're involved in your HOA and you all have a Facebook page or are all over Nextdoor, maybe set up a Lemmy instance. In all these cases, the organizational infrastructure is there for the administrative stuff like getting a domain and paying for hosting.
Also, I'm old enough to remember that Facebook took off when everyone's parents started joining. Imagine if the AARP rolled out a Lemmy instance. They are big enough put some serious money into development. You would probably get a lot of accessibility improvements.
Is there any way to set one up that protects the anonymity of the people involved (where even the organizers don't know each other's real names) for opsec purposes?
