Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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?
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?
it feels like old reddit
Wait, when did that become a bad thing? I exclusively browsed old.reddit.com because the new layout is a fucking abomination.
Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it 'wars'.
As for UX, there's definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstance without explicitly subbing to them all or using lemmyverse.net.
But I don't think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.
If that was a legitimate issue, MMO's (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn't have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.
Even if Lemmy was one big simple centralized server, that user would just come up with another reason they couldn't switch.
"Oh, it's too small, my niche communities aren't there"
"The UI isn't as nice"
"The mod tools aren't as good"
Etc.
"but it feels like old reddit". My god, imagine actively preferring the new reddit UI. Let them keep their shiny jangling keys instead of coming over here and pestering the devs for a snoovatar feature or whatever nonsense.
The 'maybe read for 2 minutes to figure it out' miniscule barrier to entry is a feature not a bug.
because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
No, it isn't.
The UX is fine. It's clean, fast, and functional. Anyone who is too fancy for "old Reddit" can stay on new Reddit with the bots and Xers. They'd just come over and be nothing but insufferable anyway.
o.oMultiple front ends and themes are available. In the end, we're here for the conversation, not fancy graphics, sounds, or CSS trash.
If someone can't get past picking a server or simple graphics, the likelyhood of them being any benefit here is minimal. The more is not always the merrier.
For the majority of commenters: UX is not UI.
The poor UX experience is the research a person has to do before they can even participate. You need to have a basic understanding of how the network works, and then you have to shop around for a server.
It’s enough friction to prevent people from on-boarding and that’s not good for a platform that needs people to be valuable.
- Stop making blanket claims about instances you like or dislike, no matter how fair you feel they may be, and don't fall for the bait of others doing it. This is just drama and is exhausting to read about.
- Instead of suggesting people "join Lemmy", say things like "Join Lemmy at programming.dev" (or whatever instance you yourself are using). Sure, "but picking a server is hard" will always probably be a complaint, but leading with the one you personally use is the best way around it. If you're on a hobby focused instance (like I am) then maybe suggest a generic instance to people outside of your hobby. Don't be afraid to suggest lemmy.world. It's better to suggest the biggest instance than endlessly debate about which one is the best to suggest.
Reddit being popular is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy.
When you get right down to it: people don't care that Reddit is selling their information, that the site itself is a piece of garbage, that running the site requires a bunch of no-life weirdos whose numbers will only increase going forward and whose power will likewise, or that the design actively encourages bots to the point of disincentivizing actual human beings from using it.
They want their memes, they want their news, they want their niche little interest subs and they want their porn. The simple fact is that lemmy is a smaller version of Reddit with fewer options and to the majority of people who don't care about their data or the objectively dogshit running of the site, there is no reason to cross over to Lemmy.
Until Reddit takes a Musk-type turn into being totally unuseable, lemmy will only see a trickle of users who are burned by Reddit.
There was a lot of debate about this when the reddit exodus happened in 2023. I initially joined then and have stuck around since. Something that was said a lot back then that I agree with is that Lemmy doesn't have to compete with reddit. It's alright for this corner of the internet to exist and not be the single dominant one.
If someone makes a reddit clone somewhere else with more liberal admins, good for them. I wouldn't be going there. The fact that Lemmy is sectioned into servers is part of the appeal. I'm glad that I can be part of a server with very progressive administration. I would never get this level of moderation and support from any other social media. I'm fine with that meaning that uninformed people who just want to doom-scroll are less likely to come here.
We have seen growth periods time and again when problems arise with private social media companies. Each time, a little more people from the initial wave join for good. I think that's fine. Most lemmy servers are run for free by people who just believe in what we're doing here. We can always add more servers, but we can't handle the kind of traffic that reddit handles. We're entirely dependent on dedicated people investing large amounts of their time to create and maintain these spaces for us.
https://old.lemmy.world/ looks just like reddit. It's not the UI. It's network effect and there's not a lot to be done.
I think a big problem is a lot of the explainers for new users, at least the ones that were around back when I first joined Mastodon, were or are absolute dog shit. They were all existential explanations rather than practical ones. I was trying to figure out which instance to join, and why one might be better for me than another, and every explainer I saw was basically a variation on, "iT's JuSt LikE EmAiL. wHy Is tHaT hArD? sToP bEiNg So sTuPid, DuMmY." None of them really explained the user experience, and how different instances might affect it, let alone the existence of the local and global feeds and how your instance choice affects those. It was like asking someone how to use chopsticks and them telling you, "It's easy. Just put food in your mouth with them. Works just like a fork."
Technically true, but it omits some pretty crucial information.
Once you're into it and have the lay of the land, it seems really simple in retrospect. But if you're coming in cold with no idea how any of it works, and the only help you get is some dickhead shouting, "EmAiL! iT's LiKe EmAiL!" then the learning curve seems a lot steeper than it actually is.
Gonna don my tinfoil hat here for a second...
Was the monetization of the API a deliberate move to kick out the progressive and tech-literate long-time reddit users (myself included, with 16 year badge and centuryclub), to in turn make the site more of a Nazi, pro-Trump circle jerk?
Because I really think it succeeded. The whole atmosphere shifted that day, and I've barely been back except when I end up there out of muscle memory or a Google result...and those often have the best answers removed by someone who went through and scrubbed their account.
We all remember how Spez treated r/thedonald, right?
The vast majority of people want an experience where federation is invisible. Sign up and post/comment. To maintain the benefits of decentralisation and choice, that's never going to be a truly workable thing.
The vast majority of people don't want to create or even participate in communities, they just want to lurk, scroll and get their new content fix. Every social media based site I've ever been on, federated or centralised has a large group of people complaining about the lack of new content but never take it upon themselves to apply the obvious solution themselves.
These are not necessarily UX issues, these are people issues.
Maybe its time to stop continually worrying about this subject and concentrate on creating great communities? Because if we do that then users will participate organically.
The biggest UX issues, in my opinion, is the process of choosing an instance and content discovery.
When you go to "join lemmy", rather than choosing a username, you're presented a big list of instances, and you have no idea what that means and what it means for your experience if you choose one. Even though in reality it doesn't really matter, just having the list paraylyses the user as it's not a process they're used to. Users are likely asking themselves:
- Am I going to miss out on content from other instances?
- Do I need an account per instance to interact with their communities?
Sometimes I think it would be best if we could have some kind of read-only instance people can create an account on and get stuck in first, then choose an instance to sign up to once they understand it. The instance would be locked down so they couldn't create any communities. So basically when they they're directed to join-lemmy and go to sign up, they create an account on that instance right away and get started.
On the discovery front, a potential idea would be to allow communities to have a specific category tags field. When a user signs up, the host instance could have a page that they're directed to (this would be controlled by the instance, so they wouldn't have to have it enabled) which lets the users pick some topics they're interested in and can then subscribe to the communities right away.
Just tell new users just sign up on your instance. Make it less confusing by sending them to a specific website and not just telling them about the software.
I swear to God, there are so many tech people here that overthink it because they know details that the average user would not give a single fuck about.
Bad UX isn't keeping most people away from Lemmy. Not being able to give up their addiction to Reddit is what's keeping them from Lemmy. There's a lot of people who will complain about the shitty things billionaires and tech companies and politicians do to them, but aren't willing to lift a finger to change things.
You're never going to bring those people to Lemmy unless Reddit shuts down and you develop an algorithm to spoon feed them whatever they want to feed their doomscrolling habit. Lemmy is better off without them.
Reading these comments I feel a sense of dread. You are all experiencing survivor bias. Initially when I ran into barriers I gave up for like a year before bothering to try Lemmy again.
If you don't want Lemmy to serve as an actual counter to corporate controlled social media if it means letting in "normies" then you are content with corporate controlled social media continuing to dominate our lives. Which sounds about right for humanity. The smugness is vile.
Just bring on the vacuum decay event already.
Honestly, if picking a server is too difficult, how have you survived this long? It's literally like picking an email host. That's the UX people are complaining about. How far have we fallen that making a choice is now a problem? "Pick what you like" leads to people going "OMG, this is terrible, I have to make my own decisions😭😭" No wonder people love AI, because they can't think for themselves.
The only improvement would be setting a default or giving them themes to choose from which they are interested in and selecting a server for them based on that.
Could have auto versus manual server choice. Can always maintain option for granular selection for those who want, but "normies" could walk into a quiz when migrating?
-
Top three things you used Reddit for? (List of maybe 10+ things, servers can maintain their feature list to empower this)
-
Do you like A) talking to everybody about days topics B) talking to a smaller group of like minded people
-
Do you like A) a MORE moderated space B) a LESS moderated space, realizing you may see more spam and controversy
And then calculates a server that meets needs, if multiple, then random number generator to assign a server from the filtered options. On user side, all they see is a quiz followed by a typical registration screen. This would help with distribution of users across niche servers, but feel lighter for user. They also would assume a more curated experience, regardless of where they end up. Servers could have to opt in to be fed users from search of they were afraid of impact on cost to maintain server.
The above likely aren't the right questions, but this framework could be effective
-
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 501c(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.
P.S.
Check out how theATL.social is organized. The guy did as a LLC, but he seems to be community focused and transparent.
https://yall.theatl.social/post/201135
New users get overwhelmed with decision fatigue, especially when they have average intelligence.
When selecting a federation, new users should be told:
"Because Lemmy isn't run by a large corporation, lots of small volunteers run Lemmy and run different copies of Lemmy at the same time. These different copies are called instances. You can choose 1 or just click the large red button and we'll randomly select one of the most popular instances for you. If you aren't sure what to choose, just press the button!"
The comments here are smug as fuck.
It should have an account creation process like those old RPGs where it asks a series of questions then says, “we recommend this server: <blah>. It is <one short sentence about its content>” then has click next to proceed or click “I want to choose another server” to just get a list.
1-hate, 5-love Do you like capitalism? Do you like tech? Do you like sports? Would you prefer a large server? etc
It should also be possible to skip the quiz and go straight to server selection at any point.
lol lol
- Reddit sucks
- I can’t be expected to make a decision
- I’ll stick with reddit
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):
-
A quick animated video showing the benefits of Lemmy and how this all works (if it hasn’t already been done yet)
-
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.
-
A lot of disingenuous Lemmy users in that thread pretending that picking a server is more confusing than filing your taxes. I think join-lemmy should probably hot-list like 6 or 7 servers instead of making you choose via a primary interest, since you can migrate your account later anyway. But I am personally not tech oriented and managed to make an account and find an app without an issue.
The goal was never to convince people who don't know how email works to join, it's to convince an average reddit user to join.
The fediverse being "endless wars about who is federated" is not really true, is it?
Sure not everyone is federated with everyone else, but legacy social media is federated with nobody at all. Federation is the entire point of the Fediverse, you connect with people you want to connect with and you don't connect with people you don't. It's as simple as that.
Plus, do people really want to be on a single platform with everyone else in the world? Because that's a big part of what broke the internet in the first place...
99% of users are going to check out when you ask them what server to join.
I'm so sick of this dumb ass argument...
People who complain about "servers" need to tell me what they think "the internet" is. The existence of servers didn't stop online video games, email or discord/slack from catching on with hundreds of millions of people, so why is it suddenly a problem when it comes to the Fediverse?
Onboarding obviously needs to be better, but I'm going to be totally honest honest here: I don't think these are legitimate, actionable or useful critiques.
These are merely excuses from people who are addicted to legacy social media and who don't give a shit that the internet is owned and controlled by a few rich corporations.
Lemmy has good UI, the defaults set are just bad and most people will give up before discovering Photon etc.
Something like https://phtn.app/ really should be the default
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.
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/
The problem is content, there isn't any. Either I select all -> hot and see new content that almost feels like /r/subreddit_name/new or I select all -> active and while those have engagement, its all very old content, like a day old, two days old, etc. And then the other problem is that I only see two types of content usually: Either articles or screenshots from social media. Nothing else.
I just think that unless there's a sudden influx of users for whatever reason, lemmy will never pick up. We just need more and more people, but have no way of getting them, not to mention so many communities just choosing not to migrate off Reddit, especially huge sports communities.
The one thing that I like about the fediverse is that it somehow unintentionally has a filter to keep the low effort people from poisoning the well.
I have been on the fediverse from 2019 and these types of arguments have been floated times and again at each exodus wave. they expect to be offered everything on a silver platter. they come into a new platform maintained by hobbyists and good will people and they expect it to offer the same features, experiences and user base or even better than the once on proprietary media that spend billions of dollars to acquire that user base. they get screwed by one company and hope that another for profit won't do the same. Lemmy is even easier than email, as you don't need to know the handle of people of communities you interact with you just search for them or explore the public feed. We don't need them here.
there are many aspects the fediverse can improve upon. decentralization or federation isn't one of them
So my understanding from reading this (and other threads on Lemmy) is that:
-A majority of Lemmy users would rather the userbase remained small (in comparison to corporate social media and even compared to Mastodon).
-And a small but vocal minority wants to grow Lemmy to the point of being at least one of the choices, if not the de facto preferred alternative, on the mind of most Redditors who are sick of Reddit.
Is that accurate?
edit: formatting
I think people who claim that the UI/UX is fine are missing the point. It is fine to you, but it is not fine to whomever made the claim. And for every person that makes such claim, there are hundreds/thousands who think/feel the same but don't say anything.
Lemmy, as a community and as a project, should seriously listen more to the opinion of newcomers.
Maybe it’s personal bias but I’d put a lot more weight into the comments about
- too few members
- wtf is multiple servers?
While I understand the power, the ideal of multiple federated servers, I still see it as an impediment for use. I know there’s online descriptions but I fail to see why I need to research and choose a server, especially when none really have the membership to support smaller communities yet
-
The apps are kinda meh. I haven't found one that doesn't come with significant disadvantages yet, and I've tried FIVE.
-
There's no recommendations feed. You see what you're subscribed to, or everything. No in-between. You can't see what you've subscribed to, and a few posts that the algorithm thinks you might like. People like to complain about the algorithm, but one reason it's so addictive is that it's useful.
-
Notifications don't work in every app
-
Just having a feed that behaves normally seems to be really hard to do for apps. Stop slowing me posts I've already scrolled past, and when I click home/pull down to refresh, I want new posts, not the same thing again that I've already scrolled past and ignored. Some apps have settings (that are somehow not on by default) to hide read posts and mark posts read on scroll, but I haven't tried an app where that works every time.
-
There's no "main" app. Think about Reddit before the API fees. There used to be a default app. It had its issues, but most features worked out of the box, and most things were intuitive and normie-friendly. You could use that to get comfortable with the social network itself, and then eventually try other apps when something got too annoying.
Compare that with Lemmy. You want to try it, and you already have to deal with choice paralysis. A ton of apps on the website, with utterly unhelpful descriptions ("an open-source Lemmy client developed by so-and-so"; wow, exactly zero of those words help me pick) and a random order that doesn't even let me default to one most popular one.
Quite a few apps focus on niche UI features like swipe-based navigation while still not having the basics down right. I'm several months into having joined Lemmy and I still haven't found an app that feels somewhat right. That is a challenge not one of the other social networks has managed. Congrats, Lemmy. Impressive.
-
Picking a server and signing up in general is complicated. And it's an impactful decision that you have NO tools to make so early, unless you start researching like it's school homework.
.world? That's popular but you'll be judged for having joined it, plus you lose access to the piracy community. .ml? Hope you like communists and DRAMA. And if you get it wrong, there's no intuitive and easy way to migrate. You clunkily export your settings and re-import them; the servers will NOT talk to each other. And even then you lose some stuff.
This UX issue is tough. I don't have an easy solution. But I'm sure a UX expert could find one.
-
Manual validation of your sign-up by a human. What is this, a Facebook group? If you introduce a 24-hour delay so early in the process, of course people are going to fall off.
-
The mouse logo is kinda ugly, won't lie. I'm sure it's a more potent people repellent than you think.
-
There is a LOT of tribalism. On Reddit, there's r/Canada, that's full of convinced conservatives that won't hesitate to artificially skew the discourse. And there's r/OnGuardForThee, basically the same but with progressives angry at the conservatives.
On Lemmy, that feels like the rule, not the exception. I just joined communities based on my interests, and my feed is full of communist vs communist vs non-communist drama. Can we frickin' chill?
If I need to start filtering out whole fields of interest that were taken over, joining less popular community clones or literally defederating instances to get a good experience, we've got it wrong. Normal people don't wanna do that when they literally just got here. They'll just leave.
-
Somehow even more US-centric than Reddit. So... Much... American politics.
-
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 !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@lemmy.ml 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've gone on this diatribe about PIxelfed's onboarding process, where they have a website that says "This page will help find the perfect server for you" and then is designed to present as little meaningful information about each server as possible. Looking at join-lemmy.org, it's marginally better. "You can access all content from the Lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn't matter which you choose" 1. not strictly true and 2. if it doesn't matter why make the choice?
Here's a question I have, because I'm honestly not sure: Let's say most of the communities I'm personally interested in are on example.lol. But my account is on sh.itjust.works. How much am I burdening sh.itjust.works by mostly reading and posting to example.lol? Would I be decreasing people's operating costs if I just opened an account on example.lol so most of my interaction was on my home instance?
I am very new here, and not as passionate about the fediverse as some of you are (like your average redditor most likely).
Reading the comments here I think that the fact that you notice decentralization as a user can be a problem for many but offering simple instance lists, community lists in the UI can mitigate that and make it more a feature than a nuisance (for those that have trouble navigating it).
On desktop, I don't mind switching servers with different URLs, especially since I can read them all with the same proton UI. However, on mobile (I spend more time on social media via mobile than desktop, I imagine most people do these days) using the Jerboa app I cannot figure out how to "visit" another server. I can't enter the URL, I cannot click on the URL, I cannot search for @URL and get a list of the communities hosted on it..
I am sure there is documentation somewhere explaining how I achieve this, but I should not have to look for that just to acces different instances. I use lemmy on breaks mostly and as I said, am not passionate enough about social media to read manpages for it.. I imagine some will think "then we don't need people like you here", but in the end if close-to mainstream user adoption is a goal, you kind of will need people who just want to look at cats and discover communities as well, and making jumping between instances and finding communities is an important part of making that happen.
Edit: I do not think having an official sign up is a solutiom btw, I think different servers are neat, and I most likely will sign up to another I am more in line with when I know which are available. It is neat to choose a home server, but it should be seemless to find others. There is no need to obfuscate servers and pretend everything is centralized, but having easy access to a centralized list of servers and communities built into the UI seems like a must for me.
When reddit was coming up, a big issue people had was it was too confusing with bad UI. People didn't know which subreddits to follow. Its very similar, theres just a whole other layer.
Just find a popular instance that is federated with similar instances. And making accounts are easy too, so just do it in two or three instances. Yeah it's a bit much compared to reddit, but it's very very easy.
feels like old reddit
They obviously haven't visited https://old.lemmy.world/
I sincerely hope there's less content here than Reddit, forever. I hope the UI keeps the masses out, and the technically savy are the only ones here.
I want to doomscroll less, I want to be astroturfed less. I want to interact with more humans and fewer bots, even when that means I interact less. I want fewer AI prompts, AI Art and corpo spam ads masquerading as engagement. I want less video and more text. Overall, I want to be spending less time on the internet, on my phone, and I don't want to hear about every last toxic thing Trump did to drive me crazy. Lemmy helps me control that feed better, so I deleted my reddit account and I hope to stay here until I manage to stop opening social media at all.
Lemmy right now feels like the internet before the long september. I hope it never changes.
If you mention Lemmy, point someone towards a specific instance so it's not so much of a shock. Then they can slowly learn about what it is.
I think Lemmy needs a higher-level sign-up procedure that hides the complexity of the fediverse. This could be a webpage with a simple, clutter-free interface that handles picking and registering on an instance from a curated list semi-automatically, for example, by asking you 3-4 questions before giving you a suggested server that fits your responses (which you can change) and a button to register there. The procedure could also handle the occasional additional sign-up requirements that some instances have.
IMHO, 90% of users will never interact with the "federation" aspects of Lemmy after that, and they also don't need to. I personally don't feel like Lemmy being federated has much of an impact on my user experience day to day.
The second this hurdle is crossed we'll need a new Lemmy
I'm all on board except for the comment about micro-penises. No one should ever resort to body-shaming.
I tried to join Lemmy during the API debacle, but then it asked me to choose a server. It didn't explain what that meant or how it would affect me. I could read a long, confusing explanation of it elsewhere, but that illuminated nothing. So I gave up.
Eventually I tried again and just chose lemmy.world, since it was the largest. After that it was smooth sailing, and I like Lemmy a lot more than reddit. It turns out it didn't even really matter which server I chose. (Although now I see some comments from people saying there's something wrong with lemmy.world.)
You just need to hold the new user's hand a little. Anyone who has ever designed a UI for an office environment would know immediately that the server question is going to be an impenetrable wall for many users.
I disagree that this is a concern. If you are already exaggerating about federation wars, chances are you already tried lemmy and know a good bit about selecting instances. The average user will not care as much as you do.
The average user will go to join-lemmy site, will not care at all about the different instances and likely choose the biggest one or first one they see. None of them will think "oh no this one is involved in federation wars" because thats not something you find out before knowing some about the fediverse.
I’m going to be holding a teach-in about the fediverse. AFK I mean. Like the people I live with, and am in community with in meat space. They all want to ditch corpo social media, but aren’t sure how. I’ll hold a digital one too for my more extended community, but I want to start with the people I truly live with. I think word of mouth is a great way to onboard people as it allows for a dynamic level of handholding. This is essentially “grassroots” social media after all.
I don’t really want Reddit to join Lemmy en masse. I want the people that see the value of pre-2010 social media, and the “local” internet, to understand and have access to these tools and spaces. I think that will be best done through education, not advertising. Advertising the platform is exactly what all the platforms we want to ditch do, and we are actively trying to not be those platforms.
The sense of “needing” more users, to me at least, is a hold out of the “infinite growth”, capitalist, mindset. I don’t want infinite growth for my instance, I want the people it’s made for to find it, and enjoy communicating with the people they share it with.
Ah Lemmy. Still full of comments from smug assholes pretending their lack of sonder is the good kind, and if they don't understand something it's cause it's worthless and pointless while their knowledge is the most important.
Yeah, there are other reasons than the UX/UI and the screenshot even shows it.
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"
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 then 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.
"feels like old reddit" is a weird way to say "it feels like new reddit, but doesn't leak ram, doesn't take as much or more processing power as AI does to run, and interjects ads randomly into the feeds"
What can we do?
File issues on the GitHub for how to improve the UX, and put thumbs up reactions on issues so the devs know which issues to prioritize
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues
Or even better, make pull requests if you're a dev
it feels like old reddit
As someone who exclusively used old.reddit.com, this isn't actually a bad thing.
Also apps for the mobile experience, and I want to say alexandrite for the desktop experience?
I must be in the minority because I post so rarely that I don't sign up when I 'join' the platform, I sign up when I want to post something. When I first wanted to post something, I just joined the instance it was going to be on. (Also because it's queer, which I don't tell you about for consistency). I also don't care that much about not seeing what my instance has defederated. Or actually, not being able to comment on it, because I actually go on programming.dev sometimes, without having an account there. I don't really get it. The fact that my Instance technically requires an application might actually be a UX hurdle, but otherwise, you just click Sign Up, enter email, name, and password, and that's it, right? It could be a UX problem that you miss out on content you don't see, but you also already see a load of content that you're not going to miss out on. Tutorials on how x-instance moving works might be cool though, if they don't already exist. Making them more visible might limit the defederation FOMO.
Try not caring. The more Reddit users come here the more it's going to suck.
This is just bot-driven FUD anyway, Lemmy is nothing like old Reddit and it wouldn't be disqualifying if it was.
That happened to me in the reddit exodus, I switched to Lemmy and faced a lot of analysis paralysis, ended up in Lemmy.world out of spite and then I regretted my decision.
So yeah, in my experience it's bad UX design, it felt like gatekeeping tbh.
When it comes to software things, I do tend to err on the side of supporting new users - I'll be the first to argue that a person should not have to learn how to use the terminal in order to use Linux.
That said, this situation is honestly bewildering to me. I cannot fathom how the idea of having choices could be considered, let alone by so many people to even make this into a controversy, to be bad design. That's the very thing that makes federation great.
You're all seriously overthinking this. Just look at a few of the most populated sites, and pick one that looks good. The choice makes 95% no difference in practice because on most instances you're going to see all the same content as soon as you press the All button anyway.
One thing I can imagine that would make the experience better, is maybe if there was a one-click way to join or migrate to another lemmy instance, using an existing login. Personally I don't think it's a big deal to just quickly sign up for a new instance if I want to. But I did see that Pixelfed has the option of signing on by using a Mastodon account. So maybe something like that can help?
The UI isn't the problem? The attached screenshot shows people talking about federation. Federation is very confusing, but also the core part of how the Fediverse functions. The only thing you could to is to provide an entry portal, where all servers are categorized by the type of content they provide and you can check and uncheck the type of content you want or might want to interact with. Based on your choices, the portal could recommend a random Lemmy or Mbin instance that has a track record of being reliable and allows you to interact with most content of that type. So if you'd want to see porn for example, the portal should choose an instance that is federated with lemmynsfw.
Lemmy only really became usable for me after I blocked certain instances/communities. Tbh if I wasn't permabanned from Reddit I probably would have quit early on and went back to Reddit.
This wasn't because of UX. It's was because some of the most active and highly upvoted instances that had posts hit All constantly were full of terrible people and idiots.
However now that I realize how powerful that is to be able to block whole instances and curate your experience and realize that it's basically impossible to Permaban someone from Lemmy, I'm enjoying it a lot more.
So they want to replace a social media site ran by rich fucks with a social media site run by rich fucks?
I spent way too much time trying to understand why I wasn't taken to the comments when I hit the comment icon...
... in the screenshot
Bells and whistles = ads, tracking, loads of bots
What can we do?
More flaming about tankies and .ml that will help.
ABSTRACT AWAY THE FEDERATION!
Fuck the top comment. Old.Reddit is the only tolerable way to access that shithole. What "bells and whistles" do you want? It's a fucking link aggregator.
we can redesign the on onboarding process.
🛑 stop explaining new terms 🛑 fuck infinite list of random names with anime girls (what do you want me to do,read!?)
Make it like a map and turn instances into buildings (or gardens/circle/doesnt matter). Show some stats like how big, who i can talk to, topic. Gamify the experience so the fatigue turns into curiousity.
Good! The last thing we need is the Facebook crowd.
Who cares? If someone can't figure out how to join a server, then I don't want them here. If people think that reddit has some amazing UX, then I don't want them here. If people think another corporate website (bluesky) will save us, then please stay away...
The post about Lemmy has 500 upvotes while the crybaby replies only have like 100. I'll happily take a ratio of 5 reasonable people joining Lemmy for every 1 weak baby staying on Reddit.
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.
I don't know, feddit.nl is pretty chill. I always see everything and barely anything objectable
Its so nice tho, all the alternative front ends are fire, I like all the ios apps, I prefer it to reddits garbage, they made it worse every update down to forcing answers to take up a tab in the last one
I remember being curious about the fediverse and when I first looked and saw "instances" I got decision fatigue.
I didn't know if an instance would limit me from interacting with others, could randomly disappear (ie hexbear domain), or if some instances would be a bad fit. I also didn't know of it was unchangeable. Decision fatigue set in and I was less excited, but still registered.
To overcome that, there should be a "randomly choose for me" button with notes next to it that say you can change later, it won't impact things, and you can interact with any instance. For random selection, just make it the top 3 most popular instances. Use a fun icon to indicate random change so the on boarding user has to think less.
Instances seem very confusing to an average user, as does federation. There could be an explanation like "Instead of 1 big company controlling everything, there are many copies of Lemmy that are in different places run by volunteers. These "instances" or copies are all Lemmy and can interact with each other, but having many copies means there isn't ever 1 big company who can set all the rules and suddenly change thing in a bad way. " and then the random selection button which almost everyone would choose.
The average user dosn't want to RTFM and also has an IQ of around 100 which is really low. The average reading ability of someone in the USA is like 6th grade level or something atrocious. You can't overestimate average intelligence in an in boarding process.
The problem is trying to get people into "Lemmy", where they have to understand federation and choose an instance, etc - instead of trying to get people into a specific instance. I know you don't want one bloated instance, but if that was the mission it would be a lot easier to get people on board.
OP, FYI I pinged you on this post but it was probably drown in the replies to your posts: https://lemm.ee/post/55244676
If you want to try out your approach (Photon as default, probably some communities hidden from the All feed), feel free to create a community dedicated to that project. You can probably promote it here and on a few other communities. The biggest challenge is probably going to find an admin wanting to give this a try.
I wanted to do something similar a months ago ( https://lemm.ee/post/52588852 ), but no admin was interested. Maybe you'll have more luck.
I use the Boost app for Lemmy so it basically feels exactly like the ideal Reddit experience felt back then, which is fantastic.
As for being put off, the only thing that really bothers me is the extreme hatred for Windows and the deepthroating of Linux. It's creepy.
Like, I love Linux and use it for many things alongside Windows, but I don't get obsessively weird about it to the point of creating memes or going out of my way to tell people why they're wrong for using one over the other, you know?
If that were toned down I'd certainly feel a little more relaxed, but on the whole the Lemmy experience has been lovely <3
Unlike twitter, if there are UI issues, people have a lot of options to try different clients, both mobile and web. I don't use one only, I flip between a bunch of them, both on web and mobile. Sometimes the vanilla Lemmy experience is what you want, other times someone might have made a great ui for browsing one specific community that you subscribe to.
I'm also somewhere against the argument of it being difficult to pick a server, too difficult to know if it's the right one for me, etc etc. In other parts of life, people make decisions on this all the time, day in day out, without batting an eyelid, and even on issues with a bigger impact on them, than which federated instans they sign up to a service on. Mobile phone subscriptions, which email provider you should use, what internet provider you should sign up with.
For some reason, social media seems to be one of these areas where we think it's totally fine that monopolies exist, and options are not... an option. We need to resocialise the idea that it doesn't hurt to make a conscious choice about where you lay your identity online, and what you sink your time and attention into.
I feel like probably the biggest UX improvement Lemmy, and the fediverse more widely, could do is to make user migration more seamless. I’m thinking federated SSO, basically, where once you have an account anywhere on the fediverse you should a) be able to use that account anywhere else in the fediverse and b) move where that account is hoeted to anywhere else in the fediverse.
I believe this is related to whatever the hell ActivityPod is doing? Feel free to correct me on that. Regardless, get something like this in place as well as better instance and services discovery (and maybe the ability to find your other connected services from you ‘account’ pages on whatever service you’re on) and I think people might start to think of fediverse as less ‘an alternative’ and more ‘the better one’.
Basically, we need standard protocols for user data management, transfer, credentials management, and service and instance discovery. I’m sure some of that exists, the important thing will be to streamline and standardise the actual UX.
There are aspects that could be better, sure. I think communities should be like sets of posts, subject to unions, conjuctions, and other set operations. Then you wouldnt have the issue of 5 versions of c/memes, they could be virtually joined into one memes community at the user level (and the user can filter out instances, communities, and users they don't like of course). Moderation could be decoupled from communities and made a broader service that users choose to interact with, agreeing to a level of moderation comfortable for their experience.
But also, put me in the group that thinks lemmy should stay small. Corpo social has convinced us that a single big room with every idiot and literally their mother screaming into it is how the internet should be and it isn't. We can go back to smaller, focused online communities that don't openly invite everyone to come in and fight.
Centralization tendencies are all rooted in power and control. We need to fragment more.
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.
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.
Someone advocating for bells and whistles will get eaten alive here. Too many people would rather read their feed on a git terminal. The pushback would be worse than the community drama!
Lemmy doesn't need low bar registrations. Lemmy will grow slowly without the immaturities and the to pompous class.
People will build apps and make lemmy more "fun"
Corporate social media is easy because it keeps the ad clickers there. Do we really want that environment here?
All the quality (non bait clicking content suppliers) will come here and all the spam artists will stay over there.
Just let Lemmy grow organically with a little barrier to climb and we'll be alright
Edit: misspelled word
Facebook has servers all over the world; there's not just one Facebook server although it appears to users like that. What would be the effect of asking (potential) Facebook users which server they would like to join?
In a somewhat related question, does anyone know how the extra-instance account transfer request is going? Not sure where to look to find out.
phtn.app client is amazing. looks modern and beautiful.
Can recommend
Good, Lemmy doesn't need morons like these
Good.
Love old.lemmy.world
IMO if Lemmy had all the features that old.reddt had it would still be an objectivly worse UX experience. Federating reduces UX, that's just a rule.
We should focus on making the onboarding process as simple as possible like enabling social login (inb4 insecure and not private: let people make their choices), and making it easier to move between instances and understand what instance you're looking at.
Well yeah, which server do they want to join? Maybe sample servers that reset every day would be useful?
Multi-reddits on Lemmy!
Yep. I came, couldn't get into it, https://lemmy.world/post/1388830 and unfortunately went back to Reddit.
donald glover saying good dot gif
Something else to keep in mind is that most Redditors nowadays (like Twitter and Bluesky users) are mobile users. I think a lot of Lemmy mobile apps have a good UI and solve that problem. However, it's hard to point new users at a single website/app/etc to join. Bluesky does that. Obviously, that's bad for decentralization, but Bluesky is also still a beta protocol that's headed toward decentralization at some point. Their single instance was necessary for them at the start.
When a new/small social media platform that acts as an alternative of a bigger platform pops up, one of the common topics on the alternative are people talking about how it's better than the old place and/or just trashing the old place. Eventually, they outgrow that (assuming that platform survives). I feel like that's happened with Bluesky. Browsing it, everyone seems to be talking about their own usual topics now, and I see very few posts calling out Twitter or comparing Bluesky to Twitter nowadays.
Lemmy still feels like it's in that "bash the old place" stage to me. Maybe ~20% or posts I see are talking about Reddit or talking about Lemmy in relation to Reddit. It's annoying.
(Guy who uses email at work): MuLtIpLe sErVeRs ArE tOo HaRd
I personally love Alexandrite.app as a UX. I'm so used to it that I get confused when I follow a link and see a default Lemmy instance, lol.
For me, a major issue is federation control. On Mastodon & co, I can mute entire instances, cutting out A LOT of bullshit. On Lemmy, if I want that kind of control, I need to run my own instance. Doable, but kinda overkill.
It's one thing to hide individual subreddits on a centralised platform. It's another thing entirely to have many sites building a big platform, with the same communities duplicated with different rules and followings. That's just a game of wack-a-mole at that point.
And if I don't like the instance's communities, chances are I don't want to interact with its users either, leading to even more wack-a-mole.
