This is why I stopped promoting Lemmy and switched to PieFed.
UX is everything, and Lemmy UX sucked. The default UX (for your average user) is dog shit.
People want ‘it just works’ and PieFed offers that more than Lemmy does.
I’ve seen the Reddit users be more receptive of PieFed over Lemmy. In a post suggesting Lemmy, the Reddit users will just comment that it looks ugly, it’s confusing, devs and tankies, etc. Posts suggesting PieFed get less complaints and more signups.
Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 1 day ago
mesamunefire@piefed.social 1 day ago
Thanks! I personally think as long as people land in the fediverse, its going to be ok. But its cool to give some highlights to piefed.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Instead of recommending Lemmy in general, you should recommend a specific instance which matches the audience. For example someone posted about piefed.ca in /r/BuyCanadian. Or you can link to a different frontend like vger.app.
I did make a redesign to join-lemmy.org recently so that new users can reach the registration page with a single click. I am also curious about any suggestions you have to improve the onboarding.
Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 1 day ago
join-lemmy.org looks much improved now! And yes linking directly to an instance is the way to go, I would’ve put URLs in this promotional image instead of just names
I’m not sure if I have any specific ideas at the moment. It’s possible Lemmy has just reached a saturation point with Reddit where the people still on Reddit are the ones who bounced off Lemmy before, so they won’t give it another chance anytime soon, but they haven’t tried PieFed yet. Maybe the optimal strategy is to cycle between the recommendations to catch everyone with whatever suits them best. I think we should also try changing out the Mastodon recommendation and see if something else catches people who haven’t already switched to Fediverse microblogging.
I think PieFed’s idea of asking new users what they want/don’t want to see is a good idea.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
I made a couple of “Help Design Lemmy” posts in !lemmy@lemmy.ml recently to get feedback and ideas, which was very helpful. I will continue to make such posts to improve join-lemmy.org, and also Lemmy itself.
Had a look at the Piefed signup now, choosing categories like that is a good idea. But the question is how these categories get curated. We have something similar with the instance topics on join-lemmy.org but no one is really helping to maintain them. So for community categories it would probably similar. In 1.0 we will have some improvements for discovery, like multi-communities and a “suggested communities” collection which can be set by local admins.
For the Mastodon recommendation there isnt any good alternative software that I can see. So its probably best to recommend a single Mastodon instance, depending on the target audience.
Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 1 day ago
That person was me.
I’ve promoted Lemmy in the past only to be met with comments complaining about the ‘dogshit UX’ and tankeis.
So I switched to promoting PieFed instead, and have had no such complaints.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
And so you decided to spread that misinformation further, instead of simply replying that it is wrong? I’m also very curious in what ways you consider Piefed’s UI better than Lemmy.
Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 1 day ago
Good UX is all about removing friction and making users have to click less and think less.
Users these days are expect their hands to be held and things to just work, that sadly is just the reality.
Let me start off with saying, I started on Lemmy and even donated to Lemmy, PieFed can only grow because it’s standing on the shoulders of giants (lemmy)
My alt is AnonomousWolf, you can look it up, since I joined I complained about bat UX, but people told me to GTFO. PieFed fixes many of those issues I complained about.
Let me do a quick test and walk you through my thought possesses and UX. I’ll make 2 comments in this post, one for lemmy.ml one for piefed.social