Comment on Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
joelghill@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
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.
That’s what I send to people:
“Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
Feel free if you have any questions”
What research is needed?
Yes. Lemmy is not friendly for the “average” user. We could come up with a list of severs with pros and cons to them and then people would feel more comfortable. I came here the moment reddit killed the API and I was so confused. Federated anything meant nothing to me and I discovered lemmy.world so that’s just what I joined. LOL I still don’t know the difference between servers.
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.
It’s like politics, hahaha. Those who don’t 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
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 we’re overly focussed on, we’re 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
Hmmm. Actually maybe it can be leveraged.
There should perhaps be a default instance that it funnels everyone into but makes a “power user” option available from a drop down where they can CHOOSE an instance. Make it an opt-in thing instead of a mandatory hurdle.
Mastodon needs this too.
…
Mastodon needs this ESPECIALLY.
Yeah, that was my first thought when I read this too. There were plenty of people for whom the internet in general, or later social media, was too complex for them to bother with. I think each generation of technology leaves behind a certain % of people who are past the point of being willing or able to learn how to use something new, and that isn’t really a bad thing.
Yes, you have to have some notion of what “federated” means and how it works to make full use of federated sites. But it’s just asking people to learn a little bit about a couple new terms, and spending a few minutes outside of their comfort zone while they orient to a new environment, just like when the internet itself or social media started. And I think we obviate the entire point of building something new by trying to make it completely familiar and friction-less for people. If that was the best way to build community, then the internet would just be the phone book and social media would just be the personals section of a newspaper.
That does come with the unavoidable side effect that the majority of the people will simply not participate. It then follows that sites like Reddit will continue to be the place where the majority of the people will go.
If your goal is to participate in small communities and you are okay with the slow pace of those communities, then that’s fine. If your goal is to move people away from corporate-sponsored media for whatever reason, then this won’t work.
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
Bad UX made it hard for me to even make an account here lol, and I’m someone that has been promoting Lemmy for weeks. I think making the sign up process as easy as possible is how to do it. I’m still annoyed at how dumb it was trying to get on this site even.
lunarul@lemmy.world 1 year ago
We should shorten that to UXX