Comment on we need more users

• dantel@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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.

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  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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  • OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Skavau@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      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).

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      • OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Thanks for the clarification. I thought at some point you were mentioning how the wall of text at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html somehow never once mentions PieFed as an option, but I think that’s excellent that you mentioned those additional details.

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  • Skavau@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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