Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
-
To the guy in here going "UX != UI!!!" Sure, but you can't design UX, especially for the unwashed masses. "Tried cutting toenails with lawnmower; severed foot. 0/10 bad user experience."
Lemmy has a "have our cake and eat it too" problem. It offers two mutually exclusive promises:
-
Each instance is its own independent self-contained little Reddit with their own communities, culture, code of conduct etc. so that individuals can find a place that suits them or make one if none is available, and
-
All the servers are part of one great big federated system where all users have access to content on all instances so it doesn't matter which instance you sign up for, you can access it all.
In practice, the former is more or less true, the latter really isn't.
First there's the obvious topic of defederation, which makes the "join one server, access all of them" an outright lie. On the one hand, I think everyone here will agree this platform requires defederation to function so that we can kick out instances like lolli.rape or whatever, which thank you admins and mods for dealing with. But what about Hexbear, or Truth Social (which as I understand it is running on Mastodon software). The only honest answer to "where do we draw that line?" is "somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there."
It is intellectually dishonest to say that Lemmy has this problem and Reddit doesn't. Post in r/mensrights and an automod bans you from r/twoxchromosomes. Do basically anything anywhere on the platform and get banned from r/conservative. They managed to implement "It's a different platform depending on who you are" on a monolithic service.
All that crap aside, the average user has a more limited perspective on the rest of the fediverse than his home instance. Often, the UI defaults to viewing only local posts, you have to tell it to give you a global feed. You can browse a list of your local communities, you can browse a list of global communities, you can't browse a list of communities on a given foreign instance. 'Show me everything on lemmy.sports' or indeed 'show me a list of communities on lemmy.nsfw.' You cannot create (or moderate?) communities on instances you aren't a member of. It is, if only slightly, easier to participate on your home instance than elsewhere.
Either your choice of server does matter, or it doesn't.
If it does matter, we shouldn't have so many general purpose instances, it should be lemmy.music and lemmy.art and lemmy.uk. Then newcomers are presented a meaningful choice. Are you mostly interested in discussions pertaining to your country? Your hobby? Your career? Sign up here to mostly participate in that, and no matter which you pick you can visit the rest of the Lemmyverse, too."
If it doesn't matter, then design it such that instances are entirely transparent to users; eliminate the possibility of [email protected] and [email protected] coexisting, and make all instances lemmy1.world lemmy2.world, issue credentials centrally and then just spread the load in the background.
I don't think you can have both at the same time.
-
-
-
When the Orcs are raping elderly women and their sons. Then murdering them. They deserve the name. Just so you’re aware. There’s a reason they are called this. They earned it.
-
I use Eternity on android and it's a fantastic and much cleaner feel than reddit.
-
And they don't have to join. I really don't mean this in a dismissive way and respect their opinion. But why all this worrying about the need to have the fediverse dominate all social media? Maybe it's meant to be this way: your vibe decides your tribe. My vibe isn't commercial, toxic political talk, or influencers, thus my tribe is the fediverse instead of IG or Tiktok.
-
-
...and the fediverse doesn't need to dominate all social media. Period.
You'll never be able to migrate the IG influencer whose affiliate marketing business relies on the algorithm, or the Titkok million views dude who makes money off their views and lives. So I really don't understand this argument of "Oh we're alienating mass users".
Just like there's non-profit orgs vs businesses, open source software vs commerical ones, there also fediverse vs commercial social media. I prefer it here, and to each their own.
-
And for some reason it seems like half of all distro specific communities are on .ml
-
Alexandrite is honestly great. Made the experience much better. Just wish I could have it open links in a separate tab.
-
How is a simple reasonable skirmish, a war ?
-
It also means that lemmy will forever be less useful as an actual tool. You can not find nearly as many in-depth answers to topics by typing lemmy at the end of the search bar as reddit; and people will stay on reddit after they get the information they need because why go somewhere else. I understand that part of it is because reddit has been around for so long but I would think I could at least get linux questions answered here and I really can't
-
This is my thought... Don't hide it, really, more like toss a blanket over that part while people get settled. Most will stick with the defaults (whether a single default like lemmy.world or regional defaults like lemmy.ca), but they'll get the option if that's something they want to change later (I do wish there was a way to move instances rather than having to make a new account, that might also help improve adoption... "Just go with this one while you settle in and move when you know where you want to go")
-
Lots of Lemmy clients have great UI. The default web interface looks fine as well.
Wait till they try out Matrix. No client works properly and all the mobile clients are really bad.
-
-
Fully agree with that, the bar is too to high usually unless you're being handheld through the process, realistically there should be an app like how blue sky is that doesn't give you any of the options because less options means easier setup. If they want to jump instances after that that would be considered an advanced function but they can choose to do so on their own accord.
Another issue I think is lack of actual awareness, like Bsky got media coverage, the everyday person still is like "the hells a lemmy"
-
It's very common, but in Australia at least, no ubiquitous
-
We have a good looking UI try Summit or Thunder for Lemmy for app and phtn.app for Web
-
Part of me wants the fediverse to take over because the world needs open systems and not corporate outlets for ads and propaganda.
But this place is really fun how it is and I want to be selfish and keep the precious all for ourselves.
I think we have a lot of wiggle room between the two, fortunately. If we get 10x the users with the barriers to entry doing the same filtering as now, this place could really be hopping. But if we get 1000x the users and start doing Reddit numbers, who knows what it will be like.
Knowing humans, maybe there’s a critical mass at which Lemmy would fracture into multiple fediverse islands. But each could still be vastly larger than all of Lemmy right now.
-
I believe the accusation is that the admins and moderators had a discord server that they were coordinating harassment campaigns from.
-
Your #4 seems inaccurate, unless you were just walking us through your changing perspective as you joined.
This place is very left leaning and I’m sure it’s loaded with people who happily call themselves socialists while shouting down the MLs/tankies.
The main difference afaik is that they support authoritarians.
