Submitted 6 days ago by AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/133162df-4437-43a9-8099-98727eec11ab.jpeg
This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
it feels like old reddit
Wait, when did that become a bad thing? I exclusively browsed old.reddit.com because the new layout is a fucking abomination.
That’s the feature! Not a bug.
The new reddit design sucks and always has, other than dark mode.
I feel like most the old school redditors have long migrated, I’ve only ever heard good things about the new UI from relatively new users.
Lemmy is old reddit, if not OG internet ethos.
When I first read it I thought they were mentioning that as a selling point! But yeah it seems like they’re saying it like it’s a bad thing.
How old are you?
Boost feels a lot like rif which I was using and which shutdown made me switch to lemmy.
Yeah, it seems most people still on reddit prefer the newer mobile UI. I never used one of the ‘fancy’ modern reddit apps, and I’m lowkey scared for the inevitable switch I’ll have to make when Eternity finally dies. All the other FOSS apps left have a very ‘iOS’ feel to them that I can’t stand
I liked it a few years ago but they made it worse every update til it became near unusable
Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it ‘wars’.
As for UX, there’s definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstancethout explicitly subbing to them all.
But I don’t think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.
The only real federation dramas I can think of were relating to Hexbear and Beehaw. If Greenleaf was on one of those instances then maybe it could explain their skewed perspective. Otherwise yeah, I don’t get it.
Preemptively defederating from Threads was widely discussed in a lot of places.
Those went on and on and on and on for years though - it was only 3 months ago that Discuss.Online finally defederated from Lemmy.ml, making it the first top ranked instance that would be suitable to recommend to Redditors. And even then lemmy.ml still remains to bully and abuse the potential users with tankie BS (bOtH sIdEs SaMe don't ya'know).
Also before those two started there was Lemmygrad and Exploding Heads, and others I cannot recall off the top of my head but they really do go back a ways - defederation fights is kinda Lemmy's whole main entire deal. Sadly, I am not kidding: it's a Nazi bar effect where you can't convince people to join a bar that welcomes Alt-Right Nazis (although in this case it's Alt-Left tankies), bc they are turned off by such.
It's fine if we ignore what those users want btw, it's just less so if we don't acknowledge who we *really* are, and then wonder why nobody likes us - that kind of incel culture is *not* okay, at least not with me, and I will stand by that.
If that was a legitimate issue, MMO’s (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn’t have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.
But in an MMO, you still get the same content no matter what server you choose. Over here, it directly impacts what content you can interact with based on (de)federation.
If you joined a German-speaking WoW server as a non-speaking German, the experience was going to be subpar
I’m on three different instances and the sort by All-hot feed is nearly identical.
I’m not on Beehaw or Hexbear, but those instances make it pretty well known they block a lot of other instances.
PvP v. PvE seems like it would make s difference, probably? :-P
But yeah I get you: the list of varied options is too large, and worse yet opaque.
Fwiw Blaze most often just recommends 2-3 options to current Redditors, to KISS (Keep It SimpleS:-).
eh, back when the “exodus” was happening it felt like every second post is about defederation. Nowadays you don’t hear much about it anymore, but if you only looked back then I see how you could come to that conclusion.
I specifically remember looking up tables of who defederates from who and what instances allow NSFW or downvoting because this was an issue among some of the top instances back then.
I ended up making 4 different accounts over 2 months until I landed on a server I’m happy with. That will never be acceptable to any normal user.
Every time someone brings up these issues, people here downplay them like you are doing it right now and nothing is ever done about it.
This, the survivor bias is absurdly high around lemmy.
This is my fourth instance because, for some reason, it’s extremely hard to find an instance that defeds the 3 main propaganda instances, allows porn/hentai, piracy talk, weed and isn’t too pissy about downvotes.
Still I am thinking about leaving lemmy due to a complete lack of content for my country other than government propaganda… And I don’t feel comfortable creating a community for the same reason and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else from my country so… Nobody who cared about it (or who could help me mod).
I looked this up when joining a month ago because I saw hella posts on it and joining world to not see the piracy community didnt help
There are definitely issues with Lemmy but these users specifically seem to just be complaining for the sake of complaining. They want Reddit without the parts they currently don’t like, not realizing that they also need to get rid of the parts that eventually made Reddit go to the shitter - because otherwise it’d just repeat.
This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s
People these days look weird at you if don’t use Gmail so you can’t see their Google Calendar invite or some other thing that only works with Google… People are literally pushing tech monopolies.
I still see lots of different emails out there, outlook/hotmail is still huge, yahoo occasionally, icloud in the US.
Among my techy friend circle all of us have either our own self hosted mail, a ‘privacy’ company email, or something in the middle.
All to say, I don’t think it’s that uphill of a battle for the very large percentage of Internet users to accept the way federation works.
@Octagon9561 @isaaclyman worse some big email sending services like sendgrid embedded in a lot solutions don't work with privacy enhanced e-mail services.
That was Aol.
At no point has Gmail ever said “we’re no longer allowing you to send/receive emails to/from Hotmail” or has Yahoo said “we’re maintained by a single volunteer who because of real life stuff can no longer continue so we’re discontinuing our email service.”
Strawman
It’s the same thing.
Email even has its own version of federation and de federation in dkim.
The only difference is that you’re oftentimes not given access to an email address from your internet provider by default anymore so you’re not automatically joined into the system.
People balking at choosing a server are not showing you a bad user experience, they’re showing that they don’t really want to be part of a reddit alternative.
And the broader lemmy/activitypub/whatever needs to figure out if it wants to be like beehaw and hexbear and abandon the shape of reddit or if it wants to duplicate it and try to compete with reddit.
Except everyone just uses gmail now
It’s very common, but in Australia at least, no ubiquitous
“but it feels like old reddit”. My god, imagine actively preferring the new reddit UI. Let them keep their shiny jangling keys instead of coming over here and pestering the devs for a snoovatar feature or whatever nonsense.
The ‘maybe read for 2 minutes to figure it out’ miniscule barrier to entry is a feature not a bug.
Two minutes (and you’re being very optimistic here, for someone who isn’t technically inclined it’s almost certainly going to be more) of required reading on a subject that’s just not even remotely interesting to 99% of people eliminates basically all non technical people. Because they just don’t care enough to devote that time. If that’s the user base you want, that works out, but I’d like people here who can hold a conversation about something other than Linux and Star Trek. It’s honestly kinda boring here.
It’s been a while since I’ve been on Lemmy, so correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Voyager, which I’ using right now, pretty good? You also don’t have to install an app, even though the apps on the Google Play store are pretty good.
Idk why anyones upset about ppl who prefer new reddit not wanting to be here, exact type of person who should stay there
Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
Not necessarily, but we don’t want a accidental filter that filters out non tech savvy people. We want all kinds of people on Lemmy
It’s not difficult though. They just can’t be arsed and are making excuses for being comfortable and lazy. If there was a $100 million marketing budget and their favourite celebrity was here, they’d sit an hour long entrance exam. The best we can do is make it fun enough here that people want to comment.
Hell, it can filter out tech people too. I’m a programmer by trade, but I almost dipped on lemmy because the onboarding is confusing enough. Like, I obviously (mostly) figured it out, but I did consider going “eh fuck it” and dipping. The site is ultimately a luxury and not a requirement, so effort or confusion required to get all started up is also something that’ll drive me to consider it not all worth it for some social media I’m not even sure I want to be a part of yet.
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.
I don’t get how people get hung on choosing a server when people have been chosing a starter Pokémon since 1998 without any major issues. And you get just about the “same” amount of practical info.
Really, what tiktok does to a generation…
Joining is a bad experience. “Please commit now to a server on this service you know nothing about… Then you can try it out!” I understand the concept of decentralization, but it’s ass-backwards…
Aren’t you guys sick of forced infinite growth in every aspect of our collective existence? The Fediverse is not shareholder owned, we don’t have to be slaves to The Red Line That Must Go Up. Reddit went to shit when it was aggresively mainstreamed, I don’t want it to happen to lemmy as well.
because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
No, it isn’t.
The UX is fine. It’s clean, fast, and functional. Anyone who is too fancy for “old Reddit” can stay on new Reddit with the bots and Xers. They’d just come over and be nothing but insufferable anyway.
o.o
Multiple front ends and themes are available. In the end, we’re here for the conversation, not fancy graphics, sounds, or CSS trash.
If someone can’t get past picking a server or simple graphics, the likelyhood of them being any benefit here is minimal. The more is not always the merrier.
If the miniscule effort of signing up for a platform keeps someone away, they probably wouldn’t be a good community member anyway.
Wait wait wait… This implies people like new reddit… That shit makes my eyes bleed wtf
Unless we fix the UX problems in Lemmy, a Bluesky-like alternative of reddit is going to pop up, and overtake Lemmy, like what happened with Mastadon
Has software usage really gotten to the point where the average person can’t handle being given a choice about anything? Where it’s just too much effort to do anything more than mindlessly click on whatever is presented to them? 🤦
Reddit being popular is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy.
When you get right down to it: people don’t care that Reddit is selling their information, that the site itself is a piece of garbage, that running the site requires a bunch of no-life weirdos whose numbers will only increase going forward and whose power will likewise, or that the design actively encourages bots to the point of disincentivizing actual human beings from using it.
They want their memes, they want their news, they want their niche little interest subs and they want their porn. The simple fact is that lemmy is a smaller version of Reddit with fewer options and to the majority of people who don’t care about their data or the objectively dogshit running of the site, there is no reason to cross over to Lemmy.
Until Reddit takes a Musk-type turn into being totally unuseable, lemmy will only see a trickle of users who are burned by Reddit.
There was a lot of debate about this when the reddit exodus happened in 2023. I initially joined then and have stuck around since. Something that was said a lot back then that I agree with is that Lemmy doesn’t have to compete with reddit. It’s alright for this corner of the internet to exist and not be the single dominant one.
If someone makes a reddit clone somewhere else with more liberal admins, good for them. I wouldn’t be going there. The fact that Lemmy is sectioned into servers is part of the appeal. I’m glad that I can be part of a server with very progressive administration. I would never get this level of moderation and support from any other social media. I’m fine with that meaning that uninformed people who just want to doom-scroll are less likely to come here.
We have seen growth periods time and again when problems arise with private social media companies. Each time, a little more people from the initial wave join for good. I think that’s fine. Most lemmy servers are run for free by people who just believe in what we’re doing here. We can always add more servers, but we can’t handle the kind of traffic that reddit handles. We’re entirely dependent on dedicated people investing large amounts of their time to create and maintain these spaces for us.
Reddit ux is also ass. Only difference between reddit and lemmy is that the federation bit is extremely confusing and not intuitive.
Using Boost for Lemmy and it’s almost like I never switched.
Don’t over think it, the people who want to be here will be.
It’s shocking to me just how stupid the average person is today. Computing catering to the lowest common denominator has made it too easy for idiots. Make computing difficult again. Make people actually have to learn something. A tall order for the idiocracy of 2025.
Bad UX isn’t keeping most people away from Lemmy. Not being able to give up their addiction to Reddit is what’s keeping them from Lemmy. There’s a lot of people who will complain about the shitty things billionaires and tech companies and politicians do to them, but aren’t willing to lift a finger to change things.
You’re never going to bring those people to Lemmy unless Reddit shuts down and you develop an algorithm to spoon feed them whatever they want to feed their doomscrolling habit. Lemmy is better off without them.
Reading these comments I feel a sense of dread. You are all experiencing survivor bias. Initially when I ran into barriers I gave up for like a year before bothering to try Lemmy again.
If you don’t want Lemmy to serve as an actual counter to corporate controlled social media if it means letting in “normies” then you are content with corporate controlled social media continuing to dominate our lives. Which sounds about right for humanity. The smugness is vile.
Just bring on the vacuum decay event already.
I’m fine with the effort bar being selecting an instance. If someone can’t get beyond that, there’s probably not much they have to say I’d be interested in.
I think a big problem is a lot of the explainers for new users, at least the ones that were around back when I first joined Mastodon, were or are absolute dog shit. They were all existential explanations rather than practical ones. I was trying to figure out which instance to join, and why one might be better for me than another, and every explainer I saw was basically a variation on, “iT’s JuSt LikE EmAiL. wHy Is tHaT hArD? sToP bEiNg So sTuPid, DuMmY.” None of them really explained the user experience, and how different instances might affect it, let alone the existence of the local and global feeds and how your instance choice affects those. It was like asking someone how to use chopsticks and them telling you, “It’s easy. Just put food in your mouth with them. Works just like a fork.”
Technically true, but it omits some pretty crucial information.
Once you’re into it and have the lay of the land, it seems really simple in retrospect. But if you’re coming in cold with no idea how any of it works, and the only help you get is some dickhead shouting, “EmAiL! iT’s LiKe EmAiL!” then the learning curve seems a lot steeper than it actually is.
Add a bell button and a whistle button.
I think instead of promoting a page where people have to choose a server, just send people to lemmy.world directly. We should probably just get people to sign up there at first and have the ability to migrate their accounts to other servers if they want to do that later.
Having to choose from multiple servers is asking people to choose between a bunch of options they know nothing about. Get people straight to looking at content and posting stuff as soon as possible, once they’re more invested, and understand more about the different instances they can change servers if that’s what they want to do.
But yeah writhing the code needed to make account migration seamless might be a lot of work so not sure if that will happen.
I was on Sync for Reddit before going here, and checked out Lemmy as the devs switched platform. So the joke’s on them, my UX is basically identical.
That said, sucks that people shy away because of complexity.
old.lemmy.world looks just like reddit. It’s not the UI. It’s network effect and there’s not a lot to be done.
meldrik@lemmy.wtf 6 days 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?
adam_y@lemmy.world 6 days 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 6 days 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.
AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee 6 days 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.
Aqarius@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Really? You never ran into the endless “…furthermore, .ml must be defederated” posts?
otter@lemmy.ca 5 days 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.
CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
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.
PyroNeurosis@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
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?
otter@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
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
roofuskit@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
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.
xor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
this is about 0.1% of posts… quit lying
HuntressHimbo@lemm.ee 6 days ago
There are a few .world posters who make two to three posts a day about how much they hate lemmygrad hexbear and .ml.
meldrik@lemmy.wtf 6 days ago
Well that’s just a waste of time really.
honeynut@lemm.ee 6 days ago
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
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 6 days ago
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
Banana@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
I’ve seen it a few times but it’s really easy to avoid tbh
NotSteve_@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
I haven’t heard about any of that drama since the early days when things were still getting sorted out
lolrightythen@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com 5 days ago
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?
Redredme@lemmy.world 5 days ago
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.
honeynut@lemm.ee 5 days ago
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.
Nursery2787@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
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”