Comment on Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
meldrik@lemmy.wtf 2 months ago
Why is “drama” on Lemmy always highly exaggerated by people?
“Endless wars of who federates with who”. What is that person even talking about and who the fuck would even care as a normal user?
Really early on like right after the API fuckfest, there was a large influx of users who picked servers based on whatever. As a result, servers defederated and there was a lot of drama as a result.
Though that said I haven’t heard much about defederating in some time.
What would prevent the same happening in the next wave of rats jumping ship? They don’t know anything about the servers or their niches, so they pick whatever. Listing all the servers and their missions is a good start for those motivated to join, but for those more on the fence, how do we ease the transition?
I personally see three big issues with getting new users to Lemmy use and stat on Lemmy:
Join-lemmy provides a subpar experience: lemmy.world/post/24220536
I’ve mentioned a list with info of some nature a few times, with people shutting down the idea. It always boiled down to “the instances may lie about what their instance is about”. In their heads what their write may be the truth, even if it isn’t. This would leave it up to a third party to make summaries of these instances, which may or may not be agreed upon. There may be too many drastic and conflicting ideologies.
It would help of Lemmy had a simple migration option like Mastodon. Then, picking an instance wouldn’t be a big deal.
It’s also less likely to happen now. Back when that happened, users didn’t have the ability to block instances and so it was up to the admins to do that for everyone.
It’s now possible to block instances at the user level
Not really though - that only mutes communities, while the users are still free to troll you by replying and generating notifications in posts sent to other communities.
Worse, that protection has even weakened rather than strengthened over time - the notifications used to be blocked. I almost decided to leave Lemmy myself when I continued to receive notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after accidentally responding to a post that I encountered in All - I hadn't read the sidebar, I didn't know about that instance, and so how was I supposed to know!?
I did that in Lemmygrad, and then again in ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net - and after that, I very much understand why people say that we are miserable tankie trolls over here.
It's the Nazi bar effect: "We" might be fine, but there are places here that anyone can just wander into without any advanced notice of what will happen...and then they leave. And complain over in r/RedditAlternatives, warning others against attempting the same.
And since it's TRUE, we DESERVE this reputation. 100% of the people I've ever mentioned Lemmy to have outright chided me for having mentioned it. I can see why, with such bOtH sIdEs SaMe content as this:
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
When half the posts in your feed are “X instance bad” people get just tired and go out.
It has happened to me sometimes a meaningful part of my feed was just people brigading about some instance they don’t like. It’s ridiculous.
this is about 0.1% of posts… quit lying
You can either face reality or not, literally nobody cares about your opinion on the matter. Many people who don’t join lemmy say this, that is simple fact.
okay, bye!
Sure, but trends seem to hit harder here, probably because we’re smaller. There have been weeks where it seemed like 60% of the non text posts in my feed were about jeans or beans or vegan cat food. Those probably weren’t more than 0.1% of posts, but they sure felt overwhelming at the time.
There are a few .world posters who make two to three posts a day about how much they hate lemmygrad hexbear and .ml.
Well that’s just a waste of time really.
you will probably stop seeing much of that if you block users that post a lot to fediverselore and meanwhileongrad. They’re like the /r/subredditdrama of lemmy
The people who aren’t here are making excuses to not be here. Otherwise they’d be here.
That being said the feud between world and ml users is pretty noticeable
I’ve seen it a few times but it’s really easy to avoid tbh
I haven’t heard about any of that drama since the early days when things were still getting sorted out
Oh yeah, I don’t even know which one I signed up to without looking.
Been here a while now and I really like it. Doesn’t hurt that I’m a lefty that loves star trek, though.
I can’t be quiet at times and I don’t really have much to share, myself, but that’s not a bad thing to me. Easier to set it down sometimes.
When you read that stuff on reddit there’s a parameter you need to keep in mind : these people are not really discussing Lemmy. They’re rationalizing and justifying why they are not on Lemmy. Totally different conversation.
Nobody wants to come out and say “I know mainstream platforms are shit and destroying the fabric of reality but I can’t bring myself to be on a platform except it is the Hip Place to Be”. So they’ll invent stuff that paints them in a good light.
You’ll still see people claiming that Mastodon is unusable because you have to select an instance - even though you don’t have to, you can just type Mastodon on Google, click the first link, and create an account in 2 clicks. It’s been ages. But the people still using Twitter need the excuse because otherwise what does it make them?
From everyone looking in: what the fuck is, ok, was Hexbear, why should I care and wtf can’t I read anything from that place.
Same with registration, instances, etc. It’s explained nowhere where how and why and i never have found a complete index with instances and communities.
I only can use lemmy because of sync. Yes, I’m also a reddit refugee.
they’re a group of early reddit refugees from when /r/chapotraphouse got banned on Reddit for celebrating John Brown and the death of slave owners. They set themselves up a few years before the mass migrations from the Reddit API debacle, and over time they cultivated a distinctly uncompromising (and at times inscrutable) culture that heavily moderates the slightest hint of Western chauvinism, transphobia, and anti-vegan sentiments.
However, they also despise what they consider the farcical nature of Reddit style civility, and combined with disabling downvotes to force people to vocalize their disagreements, they also have the tendency to dogpile on people that aren’t perceived to be acting in good faith.
The biggest conflict with other instances is their third-worldist oriented strain of Marxism-Leninism which has a more accepting view of “AES” (Actually Existing Socialism i.e. China, Cuba, USSR, etc) that leads them to conclusions that critically favor actions by non-socialist states (Russia, Sahel States, Yemen, etc) which undermine the United States/Western hegemony.
When they updated their code to be compatible with federation, their extremely active users clashed pretty hard with the more liberal tide of recent Reddit migrants so the generalist Lemmy instances decided to just defederate from them.
It seems like Lemmy should offer really easy research data for people to back these claims up. Like just counting “Lemmy sucks” vs “Lemmy is awesome”
adam_y@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Been using Lemmy for a couple of years, not seen this once.
Also, the ux is pretty much the same as Reddit.
These people are just stakeholders in Reddit. They are afraid of change, or losing any rep they have. They sit on a pile of useless upvotes.
Banana@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
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.
lolrightythen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee 2 months ago
The UX once you figure out what works for you in Lemmy is nice, the UX getting to that point is terrible, as many have said. Most will quit before getting to the good part.
dabaldeagul@feddit.nl 2 months ago
99% of gamblers quit right before they win big /j
fushuan@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Yeah, the UX of alexandrite, Voyager or even the Voyager web app for PC are sublime. I don’t see any difference from reddit tbh.
Aqarius@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Really? You never ran into the endless “…furthermore, .ml must be defederated” posts?
fushuan@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Cofigure swipes to hide posts and just swipe them out? Idk, it’s not hard.
Aqarius@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Oh, sure, especially if it’s the same few users. It’s just mildly surprising to not even run into them.
cor315@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You can say the same thing about reddit but people still bitch about it constantly.
Contramuffin@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Same vibe as Cato in the Roman Senate: ml delenda est
otter@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
The default one is a bit minimal, but we have many Alternative UIs are as modern looking as new Reddit.
They also work much better while being modern looking. There’s a reason so many of us came over here when they got rid of third party apps, the new Reddit interface is… bad.