Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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Well, when I started to use lemmy I had a few problems:
- I read something on the landing page about "Mastodon account works too" so tried that, so basically confused fediverse, activitypub, mastodon and lemmy and wondered why nothing worked. Oops.
- I tried to join a community that was meant to migrate away from reddit, but found two duplicates. So I wasn't sure which one was the correct one. Ultimately the migration failed, even though it was a software oriented community
- Then I soon wanted to make a new account on a server that doesn't require an email. Because emails today are basically personally identifiable for security agencies.
- Then I found out that socialists are called tankies on lemmy and some of the main socialist instances are banned by the limbrols. So I made a new account and posted a little and had an interesting discussion about voting in proto-fascist democracies and promptly got banned by the tankies. Oh well.
- Then I had a discussion about how calling russian people "orcs" is racist. You guessed it, banned.
- Well several accounts later, here I am, the last sane man on the internet and you all fucking suck hahaha
I do think lemmy is worthwhile and can be fun, but as a reddit alternative it has already failed. You cannot purge insanity by splitting it up into smaller insanlets. That's just schizophrenia.
What are those?
limbrols
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Maybe this is a terrible thing to say, but I actually like that registering for federated sites requires a bit work.
IMO, the internet was more enjoyable when it was just full of us nerds
But once we need our over whatever weāre overly focussed on, weāre back to being the only ones in the computer lab at 3am
We need to bring enough nerds together or bridge the airgap, translate the jargon, find our unifying furry identity
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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:
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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
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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.
I'm of the opinion that federation should only prevent a community or instance from appearing in the all feed. I should still be able to subscribe to communities that my instance has defederated from.
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If somebody gave up on the registration, how would you know? They wouldn't be here to say it.
If you gave up on the registration, then how are you here? You're inventing impossible physics to support your arguments. Are you a professional programmer for doge?
Here's what your expert opinion is really about:
"If somebody gave up on the registration, how would you know?"
Because although I have an account here on Lemmy I can still see discussions on comparable sites."If you gave up on the registration, then how are you here?"
Because I came back a year later after coming across a good explainer for how the fediverse works.I'm not going to look at that link.
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I think, you didn't get my point. Everything you mentioned.
In the EU there is some amount of data protection and privacy rights, so that matters to quite a few people. Commercial outfits handle those distinctions behind the scenes (eg, US users vs EU users get different amounts of privacy). On the fediverse, the user has to figure this out themselves.
Beyond that, I agree with everything you say. Some of the instances don't even have the name "Lemmy" in the domain or brand which makes it confusing. Or maybe they're not Lemmy but just ActivityPub compatible. I have no idea. You can also get unlucky picking a "bad" server. I first joined Kbin.social because it had the best UI at the time but man, it rarely worked and totally put me off.
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I disagree. I just found a link to lemmy.world, with no idea of how lemmy worked, and I'm perfectly happy. People's complaints about servers seem to come down to personal issues.
Itās like politics, hahaha. Those who donāt trouble themselves with too many details remain content with whatever they their emotions dictated while those who do research, sort out real facts, read reviews, understand the platform details live the next four years in constant anxiety
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Especially because most users respond to this with āgood.ā
good.
Your comedic timing is impeccable.
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).
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"If somebody gave up on the registration, how would you know?"
Because although I have an account here on Lemmy I can still see discussions on comparable sites."If you gave up on the registration, then how are you here?"
Because I came back a year later after coming across a good explainer for how the fediverse works.I'm not going to look at that link.
Then I'll just quote it directly:
"Hereās what all these complaints about federation choices reminds me of: every job Iāve ever had, new people get hired from time to time. What do they do? Long before theyāve 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 theyād 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.
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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
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I'm of the opinion that federation should only prevent a community or instance from appearing in the all feed. I should still be able to subscribe to communities that my instance has defederated from.
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.
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Whether these are just lazy excuses or not, but let's be real for a moment.
Imagine someone, who's used to go to reddit.com, search for a reddit app in the app store, both of which have the same logo, design, etc... and use their username/password to login and browse the content.
almost every service, that people use for the last decades is based on this specific approach, except for emails. Even the TLD was always .com
Now imagine, how overwhelmed those people might feel, when you tell them "just come over to lemmy".
Lemmy, where? lemmy.com? Here's where you than start explaining the different instances, federation, etc..
the next question will be: where's the Lemmy app? Remember, the unified logo and design? well, good luck explaining that all lemmy apps are de facto third-party-apps.
Now, once they make it throug all of that, the next hurdle that will confuse the hell out of them are the communities scattered all across the instances.
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.
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Then I'll just quote it directly:
"Hereās what all these complaints about federation choices reminds me of: every job Iāve ever had, new people get hired from time to time. What do they do? Long before theyāve 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 theyād 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.
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.
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Well, right is a term relative to centre which is relative to left.
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.
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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 numbersā¦ but none of them are at zero or above. They are both negative, just by varying degrees.
Are you referring to yourself as ādragā or is that a typo?
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-7 and -9 are both numbersā¦ but none of them are at zero or above. They are both negative, just by varying degrees.
Are you referring to yourself as ādragā 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.
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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 understandā¦ either you donāt want to understand or youāre not willing to understand orā¦ thereās something else going on here.
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I was trying to be analogous to help you understandā¦ either you donāt want to understand or youāre not willing to understand orā¦ thereās 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
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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?
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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.
ok, yeah, kinda hard to argue with that. Not sure what a good middle ground would be.
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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.
