Comment on we need more users
dantel@programming.dev 2 days ago
I’m a very new user and who wanted to give this a chance, here are the friction points from my point of view:
In short the user experience is abysmal.
Someone in here already said it, but ‘Lemmy’ is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn’t bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I’m not sure I’ll stay.
You can say that again. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy
Guess what results come up first when you search for lemmy
Lemmy standing for “Marxist-Leninist” surely is off-putting to some. Might be better to re-brand it as “Feddit” (federated Reddit).
Names are a discrete and contested domain and honestly I don’t see how Lemmy being also a person is a hindrance. Coke is also a drug yet no one complains, certainly not the big corpo.
Protip: you can search for more than one word on search providers. Something like “lemmy social” or “lemmy server” for example.
It just makes it more annoying to search for anything lemmy related
Have you considered trying out Piefed? Piefed has custom feed options currently.
The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn’t help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
I don’t really know how you make the onboarding, the instance selection easier at this point. What do you propose?
What site did you use when you found lemmy?
I’m a reddit user and that’s also where I first heard about lemmy the first time.
Yesterday I decided to give it a try, current events pushed me away from everything American and so I thought it was about time.
I searched for something like ‘lemmy getting started’ and landed on this site: join-lemmy.org/docs/…/01-getting-started.html
So the first greeting is a wall of text. After I read through it, I found myself here: join-lemmy.org/instances
Now I got a bunch of options with no real way to evaluate what’s what. I spent some time there looking through the options and didn’t really know what to choose and what the impact would be. I used a search engine again to look for some opinions about the biggest ones which lead me nowhere, mostly
So I kinda have up and selected programmers.dev because that’s close enough to what I do professionally. I clicked on join and was presented with this programming.dev/signup
So I don’t know if that differs from instance to insurance, but you need a moment to process this. The first few fields are obvious but then it starts to get a little weird. Instead of a checkbox or even implicit accepting of TOS and privacy policy (by registering here you agree to…) you have to take or copy paste that exact sentence into that answer box with a preview button(?) and then fill in the captcha. After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
But it didn’t end here. Because I found that the webui wasn’t that great on mobile, I wanted an Android app. So I ended up here: join-lemmy.org/apps
And yet again was confronted with a bunch options I somehow had to evaluate. I’m still in the process finding an app I really like.
Now I know this is no rocket science, and having options is a good thing usually.
But still considering the average usually not tech savvy user, all of that is too much by quite a bit. That’s overwhelming for the majority of people.
This whole thing needs to be a 10 second streamlined process. There should be one button to get you started. The instance selection site tells you: ‘You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which one you choose.’
So if that’s the case, why bother the user with it? I admit I know jack shit about the fediverse, but if I were to design such a thing, I’d separate the IdP (identity provider) from the service/content providers. Have a couple of them redundantly, hosted by different parties so one entity can not shut down everything. Let the user register once, replicate that identity across the IdPs and let some interest selection wizard determine which content instances the use should be added to.
I know that’s a big architecture change and will never happen. So maybe have that one obvious registration routine for a user and choose a first instance for the user based on interests or randomly (from a curated list to prevent users landing on some extreme instances) if the user can not be bothered to fill in their interests.
Have one default app which is good and recommended that. Let the app have sensible defaults (like the sorting thing), present most popular content first to hook the user.
Let the user look for alternatives later if they want to do that.
Don’t let the user do all the homework upfront before they even know whether they even care and if it’s worth the effort. Most people simply won’t do it.
PS. Nope I do not know about ‘Piefed’. I’ll check it out later. It wasn’t mentioned on all that sites that I looked at and that’s part of the problem.
That’s just my 2 cents.
Thanks for your feedback!
You landed on join-lemmy.org/docs/…/01-getting-started.html to get started but you should have landed on join-lemmy.org which is a much simpler UI, i think. Somebody sent you the wrong link. I think, there should definitely be a more prominent link to the actual “sign up here” page.
I’d separate the IdP (identity provider) from the service/content providers
That is indeed a good idea and i’ve never heard it formulated like this before, but i gotta think about it now.
After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
That is definitely a big problem that should be changed; I’m not sure but maybe you should get an E-Mail after your registration is successful and maybe you should also be able to log in and use the account immediately (up to a limited extent) without waiting for manual confirmation.
Here is the instance chooser that @Skavau@piefed.social mentioned.
There are a ton of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks. Like Reddit’s, PieFed’s “search” feature sucks ass (by design, as it is not the top priority right now), and Lemmy’s btw is super fantastic, though you don’t even need to have a user account to use Lemmy’s search feature, and everything else is better on PieFed, often by a lot (but, some very few not as good though). PieFed even has features that Reddit itself lacks - which makes sense when you realize that all features that Reddit has pumped out in the past 10 years or so have been to increase their profit margins rather than offer any functionality that users themselves wanted.
PieFed is the future of the Threadiverse. Many instances have already or are currently in the process of switching over to it. At least give it a look? The sign-in process will surely convince you to stay, but if not then we’d all be interested to know your thoughts on what turned you away too?
Oh, one major caveat: most of PieFed’s most advanced features (such as polls, user and post flairs, categories of communities, topic areas and user-customizable & shareable feeds, etc.) are not available yet from 3rd party apps, which having been designed for Lemmy originally they are still mainly restricted to the basic functionality that Lemmy offers. Even there, imho having to visit the PieFed website UI rarely to turn on an option that would affect daily/hourly interaction via a 3rd party app still makes PieFed more worthwhile compared to Lemmy that does not even offer those kinds of features at all - e.g. the ability to block all users from an instance.
Ah, no in this context I was referrng to the join-lemmy instance chooser that I think they joined through which removes lemmy.world (because of their idea that it’s too big) and randomises the servers a new user automatically sees. You can change it to sort by most active but because lemmy.world is not there, lemmy.ml and hexbear are right at the top (and it won’t mention that hexbear is widely defederated).
PS. Nope I do not know about ‘Piefed’. I’ll check it out later. It wasn’t mentioned on all that sites that I looked at and that’s part of the problem.
Piefed was made much later, and many of the Lemmy documentation sites simply haven’t been updated.
The problem with join-lemmy is that they removed lemmy.world from their listings because they thought it was too prominent, and now it just randomises servers. Which is not a good idea. At the same time, I don’t think a process in which everyone is bundled into lemmy.world is good. It just entrenches centralisation.
I agree. New user introduction is very poor. Took me ages just to choose an instance - and that was in no small part because I’m here not only to escape the enshittified chokepoint capitalism of american big tech, but also because I’m utterly sick of the domination of US centric points of view and censorship. Even though i know communities are not instance locked, I wanted an instance that is not likely to be managed in the same way. Time will tell if I chose well or poorly
Fwiw that’s a very popular instance you are on, so I think you will likely enjoy it? But if not, then that is the beauty of the Fediverse: you can always hop over to some other one if you wanted.
Like email providers: if gmail doesn’t suit you, then switch to another one, or even self-host your own if that sounds appealing:-P.
Note here there is zero advertising: none. Therefore, no incentive to try to “(ab)use” you as the product. Conversely, features offered to you are significantly slower to be developed (honestly PieFed is so very far ahead of Lemmy in that respect, e.g. offering keyword filters such as “Musk” or “Trump”, and advanced AI slop detection, etc.). So instead of thinking how different platforms will fall over themselves trying to compete for your “business”, think along the lines instead of how you can match up with other like-minded folks. And at some point you’ll want to contribute - perhaps code development, or donations, though what the Threadiverse needs most is just participation, as in content posted to it, the more thoughtful the better.
So far you are off to a fantastic start, welcome! :-D
Thanks for the kind reply.
I am also new (coming from Reddit) and it was confusing that there was no register button anywhere. I also agree a lot on the naming, when I searched for it to get some info on what it is and how it works I first got a lot of results for the Lemmings game. Also when you search in the playstore for “Lemmy” you get the Lemmings games…
@dessalines@lemmy.ml for the love of god please fix the onboarding
I don’t think he controls join.lemmy.org. Unless I am completely wrong.
That just might be where they set up for support questions.
That would mean that lemmy.ml chose to remove lemmy.world from there, which I would think would upset lemmy.world mods.
The onboarding being a bit difficult is a good thing IMO, it keeps the standards a bit higher and the Facebook boomers and TikTok children out. The internet was better when it wasn’t so easily accessible.
Funny enough, a lot of that ends up feeling similar with the move to Linux (and its many distros). It got a very good shift because of Microsoft voluntarily deciding “This OS will be horrible for everyone now.” but Reddit hasn’t had anything so egregious. Even Linux has a few issues with content/apps from not having enough contributors.
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Do you sort by active? Use hot or scaled instead.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah, no idea why Active is still the default.
dantel@programming.dev 2 days ago
Yeah, it was sorted by active. Changed it to hot, let’s see how that goes. Thanks for the hint.
MBech@feddit.dk 2 days ago
I usually switch sorting options when I start seeing a lot of the same stuff, or when I get to the point where the furry shit starts to appear. Keeps things somewhat fresh most days.
MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Active is basically like old forum logic, where new comments will bump it up back to the top. Scaled is my go to view first as it does a pretty good job balancing out communities of widely different sizes, so smaller communities that you’re subbed to have a chance of having their post be seen if it’s new and larger in upvoter count.
Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 1 day ago
Scaled is great for Subscribed, but I don’t like Scaled+All