Submitted 1 year 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?
So Lemmy is filtering out people who can’t take 5 minutes to understand a simple concept and make a decision?
Although, I think the answer to the barrier to entry is to be less concerned with making federated services feel like centralized apps, more concerned with rebranding server select as the advantage that it actually is. Educate those people.
What the federse needs is an app that makes the concept intuitive. I’ve been toying with an idea and how to monetize it, but I have no knowledge on how to actually make it
That bar to entry is a good thing; it helps keep most of the stupid out. The same stupid that ruined the rest of the internet.
It doesn’t keep dumb people out, it keeps non tech savvy people out, I’ve seen extremely immature people on here
I’d pick a mature user over a tech savvy user any day. Ideally they’d be both
it keeps non tech savvy people out,
Picking a server isn’t a tech savvy person thing to do and it’s a good idea to stop pretending like it is. My wife, who needs me to move her steam games to other drives for her, managed to do it without asking me a thing. Tech skill has nothing to do with it
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.
same here, eternal september growth be damned
Likewise, lol. A little friction keeps the chaff out.
It’s worse than reddit. It’s more liberal.
Literally in this thread is another person calling it too left and another calling it too right.
You notice the things you don’t like more. Political ideology is always going to have a spread the problem is the argumentative user base and user self superiority.
Oh, cool, a new account to block.
Oh cool, no one cares
(Guy who uses email at work): MuLtIpLe sErVeRs ArE tOo HaRd
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.
The problem is that mainstream media has less integrity now than it did 30 years ago. The national broadcaster in Australia for example has been infiltrated by right wing people (BTW I don’t want to get rid of ABC, just wish it was better). To cut through the propaganda, people need to acquire the skills to find their own media sources. Unfortunately that also means getting technical ability with computers now. Best thing I can think of is helping less adept people to navigate the space. Otherwise we end up with a much weaker democracy. Listening to C-SPAN callers in 2022-2024 scared the hell out of me and made me think Trump was gonna get voted back in. People stuck in legacy media space are getting brainwashed. I wish it was easier to curate RSS feeds for non-technical friends and family.
I miss those times when you actually had to learn a lot of things before being able to write stuff on the internet.
“feels like old reddit” is a weird way to say “it feels like new reddit, but doesn’t leak ram, doesn’t take as much or more processing power as AI does to run, and interjects ads randomly into the feeds”
feels like old reddit
They obviously haven’t visited old.lemmy.world
oh shit that’s awesome almost makes me want to not use sync anymore
almost
lol lol
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.
Half the fun of lemmy is all the frontends, apps, and customization options in general sprinkeld about
And then different servers even have different options so you’re not stuck with one person’s view of what things look like.
I was kind of upset that Kbin went under, lots of cool features, same data.
The UX is objectively bad, it breaks most good design principles
What UX? At least my instance have like 5 different forms to access, in the browser, then you have the apps too. There’s no way all of those UX are not good for you
That’s easily fixable by using a third-party app such as Voyager (or on the web on wefwef.app)
Which of the seven primary UX design principles would you like to complain about?
Give me some details here.
So does old reddit but its also the only version of the site I find usable. UX people can have absurdly lopsided priorities.
The majority wants better UX (look at up vote ratio of comments)
A fair amount of users want to gatekeep lemmy to only tech savvy people.
BeCaUsE fUcK dUmB NoRmIeS WhO CaNt FiGuRe It OuT, iTs JuSt LiKe EmAiL
There’s a lot of us who just want better on boarding and defaults, it’s not a lot to ask.
Maybe better TLDR of how it works will help people realise it doesn’t matter too much which instance they pick
Quality content as usual. I appreciate the thought you’ve put into this and agree with your reasoning.
I use Boost for Lemmy. The transition from Reddit was easy for me, and I know little about the fediverse other than the most basic outlines.
A lot of disingenuous Lemmy users in that thread pretending that picking a server is more confusing than filing your taxes. I think join-lemmy should probably hot-list like 6 or 7 servers instead of making you choose via a primary interest, since you can migrate your account later anyway. But I am personally not tech oriented and managed to make an account and find an app without an issue.
Unless something has changed, migrating your account is more like copy/pasting config on a new account. Your post history etc however does not come with it. If that’s something that matters to you then picking the “right” server matters a little bit.
For example lemmy.world has defederated from a bunch of instances (lemmy.world/instances) Creating your account there means you’re missing some of the full experience of Lemmy, for better or for worse. A smaller instance may federate more content, but may run slower or worst case stop working entirely if the admin abandons it.
I just used a handful of different servers over the course of a few weeks to see which was my ideal server.
it’s confusing from the perspective of choice paralysis, ultimately you can just make a new account and move to another instance if you really don’t like the one you’re on.
I know this might hurt to read but the average reddit user probably is someone who doesn’t know how email works.
IMO if Lemmy had all the features that old.reddt had it would still be an objectivly worse UX experience. Federating reduces UX, that’s just a rule.
We should focus on making the onboarding process as simple as possible like enabling social login (inb4 insecure and not private: let people make their choices), and making it easier to move between instances and understand what instance you’re looking at.
The one thing that I like about the fediverse is that it somehow unintentionally has a filter to keep the low effort people from poisoning the well.
I have been on the fediverse from 2019 and these types of arguments have been floated times and again at each exodus wave. they expect to be offered everything on a silver platter. they come into a new platform maintained by hobbyists and good will people and they expect it to offer the same features, experiences and user base or even better than the once on proprietary media that spend billions of dollars to acquire that user base. they get screwed by one company and hope that another for profit won’t do the same. Lemmy is even easier than email, as you don’t need to know the handle of people of communities you interact with you just search for them or explore the public feed. We don’t need them here.
there are many aspects the fediverse can improve upon. decentralization or federation isn’t one of them
Agreed, to a certain extent. The internet was a much better place when it took at least a little effort and knowledge to join in and participate. Barriers can be a good thing.
“Here’s Lemmy. It’s like Reddit. There’s a bunch of different websites for it, but they all have basically the same things on them. Just join one near you, if you don’t like it you can always use a different one later”
That would help if they had a clue which one was near them.
Default to “nearest” one?
If you’re not a native English speaker, you could try joining an instance that speaks your language, for example.
When reddit was coming up, a big issue people had was it was too confusing with bad UI. People didn’t know which subreddits to follow. Its very similar, theres just a whole other layer.
Just find a popular instance that is federated with similar instances. And making accounts are easy too, so just do it in two or three instances. Yeah it’s a bit much compared to reddit, but it’s very very easy.
In their defense, the reddit UI did suck and the webpage was barely functional for a very, very long time. How many years did it take them to get video to be even passably functional?
Almost every Lemmy interface is an order of magnitude better than anything reddit has ever managed to produce. Voyager is a pleasure imo.
“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.
Idk why anyones upset about ppl who prefer new reddit not wanting to be here, exact type of person who should stay there
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.
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.
Bells and whistles = ads, tracking, loads of bots
I spent way too much time trying to understand why I wasn’t taken to the comments when I hit the comment icon…
… in the screenshot
What can we do?
File issues on the GitHub for how to improve the UX
github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues
Or even better, make pull requests if you’re a dev
[Deleted]
Which server do you want to use is like asking “Do you want Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo for email?” it really isn’t that big of a deal, but maybe people these days have a hard time doing that too…
…it would be if in your analogy GMail blocks Yahoo because they don’t like the politics of their CEO, Outlook blocks both GMail and Yahoo to create a safe space, and you left Protonmail out of the list entirely because almost everyone else is blocking them for not banning users who email the wrong kind of porn to each other.
It’s not a big deal until you realize the notion that they all talk to each other is mostly a lie and all the big ones block dozens of instances each. Hell, the threads on the larger instances about whether or not Threads and Truth Social should be defederated if they ever enable federation were some of the highest activity topics on Lemmy for a bit. So was people cheering about Burggit shutting down their lemmy server.
Okay I see now, that’s a good deal of nuance.
One more bad analogy, it’s like browsing private video game servers.
There’s several websites that host lists of Minecraft Servers, some are hidden from those lists due to various reasons.
A federated video game like VR Chat or Minecraft would be incredible. You could probably do that last one with a server plugin.
People always use the email comparison but it’s really not the same, it’s more complicated than that. We know it’s not too much of a big deal but it is when you don’t know what it means to be on a server.
I remember being presented with a choice of servers myself and wondering what on earth it meant, and just wanting to join the “default” one. Ultimately it doesn’t matter too much but at the time it feels like a big hurdle.
While I agree in general, there is a bit more as unlike email… Defederation is a thing.
They don’t really need to know about that until they have had time on Lemmy to hear about what those defederated instances actually do
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…
Good keep those numb nuts away. Reddit sucks not only because of Spez and his greedy overlords, many of the users suck as well and I bet there is a big overlap on the Venn diagram between people who suck and people who think lemmy is confusing
The second this hurdle is crossed we’ll need a new Lemmy
I’ve gone on this diatribe about PIxelfed’s onboarding process, where they have a website that says “This page will help find the perfect server for you” and then is designed to present as little meaningful information about each server as possible. Looking at join-lemmy.org, it’s marginally better. “You can access all content from the Lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which you choose” 1. not strictly true and 2. if it doesn’t matter why make the choice?
Here’s a question I have, because I’m honestly not sure: Let’s say most of the communities I’m personally interested in are on example.lol. But my account is on sh.itjust.works. How much am I burdening sh.itjust.works by mostly reading and posting to example.lol? Would I be decreasing people’s operating costs if I just opened an account on example.lol so most of my interaction was on my home instance?
leadore@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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? 🤦
djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
In the U.S.? Yes, absolutely.
Cargon@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
These people must have been paralyzed with fear when they had to choose an email provider.
leadore@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I doubt they even know there’s anything other than gmail.
xavier666@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Unfortunately yes. And there is no going back.
dukeofdummies@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Is there even a point to which one you pick? I just picked .kbin because I liked the UI, and when that fell apart I moved to .world mostly at random.
Is there really a large difference between them?
3dmvr@lemm.ee 1 year ago
World has no piracy communities they are blocked, kbin had microbloggings (mastodon) if you liked that, mbin kbin.earth is fork if kbin, still around. Piefed has the most potential.
IzzyJ@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I picked world cuz it was by far the biggest at the time
Hoimo@ani.social 1 year ago
I picked ani because I don’t have to sub to every anime community, I can just go to the Local view and get everything I need.
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I originally picked infosec but not too many communities were federated. Picked lemm.ee because it was easy to memorize and had a solid admin
leadore@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s exactly what I did, lol. Kbin seemed intriguing but didn’t last. I did try to look and get an idea about different lemmy instances but found very little info about any of them except for the 2 or 3 “infamous” ones, so I just went with .world, which seems fine to me.