Submitted 2 months 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?
Lemmy has good UI, the defaults set are just bad and most people will give up before discovering Photon etc.
Something like phtn.app really should be the default
Something like phtn.app really should be the default
Disclaimer: Photon is great and the dev does a fantastic job.
However, there as still issues induced by not using the default UI. One of the instances I used added photon as p.instance for a while
Photon was still in early stages, and there was a bug preventing it to load for some people (Firefox users IIRC). In the end the admin switched to Tesseract.
lemdro.id has photon as a Default, but it took them a while to the latest version, for quite some time it wasn’t ideal. I would still go to l.lemdro.id just because the Comments view was available, or because some other info was missing/hidden.
Lemmy releases new versions quite regularly, and there are usually a few bugs. Photon development is independent, and the Photon dev has to catch-up with those. Add admins sometimes limited availability to the mix and the experience can really become subpar.
Super ui! Kudos
If the UI is the problem, the lemmy devs are working on a more modern looking UI using daisyUI atm.
Agreed. I really like the default UI personally but I know it’s not exactly the most new-user-friendly and modern. There is also tesseract: tesseract.dubvee.org/communities/lemmy.world
We could stop bullying .ml users for being .ml users. That’s the only “war” I have seen here.
How is a simple reasonable skirmish, a war ?
For real. I’ve seen people being dicks from every instance. I see far more .world peeps going into a frenzy because their world view was slightly critiqued than crazy tankie takes. Not saying those don’t happen, and fuck tankies, but there’s definitely more whining “fuck .ml” memes I see. It’s just jingoistic bullshit. This is the Internet, nothing you do here really matters. Get the fuck over yourselves.
Yeah I prefer to judge people by their actions rather than what instance they’re from. If I did, I would assume every feddit.uk user eats beans and toast for breakfast.
I believe the accusation is that the admins and moderators had a discord server that they were coordinating harassment campaigns from.
The main reason why I still prefer Reddit, is content. Even though I am subscribed to similar subs/communities/magazines/whatever on Reddit/Lemmy, the content of my Reddit home screen is filled with interesting content compared to Lemmy. And, I never had to ban/hide anything/anyone on Reddit.
That problem will go away if we get more people to join lemmy by providing good smooth UX
The tough part for me is that the reason I use Reddit is for bullshitting with people about sports teams I like. Lets look at some of the communities here.
I’d love to get off reddit but until there’s actually people to talk with, this place is just never going to meet the needs of sports content that I use Reddit for. I had no interest in Bluesky until some people actually got on it as well. The Shutdown Fullcast for college football brought a bunch of people and fans there so it gave some utility to the site. Without utility, there’s no reason to be here.
In the early years fo Reddit, those wouldn’t exist either. You have to start with bigger groups (NFL, NHL, etc) and split them if they ever get big enough.
Even the NFL one, the front page of posts the most comments is 10.
Well the only way to change that is to engage with those communities and provide content. Ofc. community building isnt easy.
Yeah, people actively surrounding one water cooler aren’t likely to go across the room to a different water cooler with no one there to start a new community. There’s a lot of mental and social effort required there.
In the news in tech communities the moderation was becoming oppressive. If someone pisses all over the water cooler, then people are a lot more likely to change it up.
We see the same thing in the niche video gaming communities.
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.
The fediverse being “endless wars about who is federated” is not really true, is it?
Sure not everyone is federated with everyone else, but legacy social media is federated with nobody at all. Federation is the entire point of the Fediverse, you connect with people you want to connect with and you don’t connect with people you don’t. It’s as simple as that.
Plus, do people really want to be on a single platform with everyone else in the world? Because that’s a big part of what broke the internet in the first place…
99% of users are going to check out when you ask them what server to join.
I’m so sick of this dumb ass argument…
People who complain about “servers” need to tell me what they think “the internet” is. The existence of servers didn’t stop online video games, email or discord/slack from catching on with hundreds of millions of people, so why is it suddenly a problem when it comes to the Fediverse?
Onboarding obviously needs to be better, but I’m going to be totally honest honest here: I don’t think these are legitimate, actionable or useful critiques.
These are merely excuses from people who are addicted to legacy social media and who don’t give a shit that the internet is owned and controlled by a few rich corporations.
I’m so sick of this dumb ass argument…
The server question was 100% the reason I didn’t join Lemmy right away. It’s not that I didn’t understand what a server is. It’s that the signup form was asking me to make a decision I didn’t know the answer to, so I gave up.
With a little more hand holding, I’d have joined months before I actually did.
Well, that’s fair enough, I guess.
I think the difference between servers and what it means to be on one server vs another is not exactly obvious. On the other hand, if picking a Mastodon or Lemmy server gives a person choice paralysis, I don’t know how they can pick anything in life without getting choice paralysis.
Like, how do you know which bread to buy? I guess you just arbitrarily pick one and if you like it then just stick with it, and if you don’t then you try something else.
But listen, I’m no stranger to overthinking things, so I guess I do get it, even if it is a bit frustrating as someone who wants people to take the internet back from corporations and oligarchs. Sorry for being a bit overly dismissive. I think it’s just that I’m a bit of an old school guy, and so I mostly just hate the idea that the entire internet needs to be centralized around one website/app/platform and that any small degree of choice or distribution is a bad thing.
Well ot kinda was true for the time of the big reddit exodus, there were very active and massively upvoted threads about one instance defederating from another, instances debating on whether they should defederate, beehive publicly wondering whether to ditch lemmy etc
Indeed, but by now everything seems more or less stable.
There might be a future event when instances decide to defederate lemmy.ml, making effective that there is actually two large spheres in Lemmy
Some instances want to stay connected to both (lemm.ee, lemmy.today, SDF), but they’re not that many
I found a beautiful web client for Lemmy that I wish was the default experience. It would surely help Lemmy in gaining popoularity.
here’s the link: phtn.app
This I like, it solved many of the issues. I wish it was the default.
with was the default too.
something in the same direction can be found under blorpblorp.xyz
Thanks so much! I was using m.lemmy.world, and while it improves most things I struggle with a touch interface on a desktop. Your recommendation is great!
Thanks for the tip Photon is great!
I use it with Alexandrite as well. Those alternative clients really made a difference in my experience on desktop.
The problem is content, there isn’t any. Either I select all -> hot and see new content that almost feels like /r/subreddit_name/new or I select all -> active and while those have engagement, its all very old content, like a day old, two days old, etc. And then the other problem is that I only see two types of content usually: Either articles or screenshots from social media. Nothing else.
I just think that unless there’s a sudden influx of users for whatever reason, lemmy will never pick up. We just need more and more people, but have no way of getting them, not to mention so many communities just choosing not to migrate off Reddit, especially huge sports communities.
You’re right, but you’re also not seeing some of the great and diverse content on Lemmy. Obviously reddit has a fuckton more content. Network effect and all that, but my Lemmy feed is not as you describe. I’m subscribed to a bunch of Linux, FOSS, privacy, music, and other great communities. While I do see articles and screen caps when I browse the all feed, my curated feed is full of questions, discussions, new (to me) music and more.
It certainly takes some effort to curate a feed for yourself, but it can be done.
So my understanding from reading this (and other threads on Lemmy) is that:
-A majority of Lemmy users would rather the userbase remained small (in comparison to corporate social media and even compared to Mastodon). -And a small but vocal minority wants to grow Lemmy to the point of being at least one of the choices, if not the de facto preferred alternative, on the mind of most Redditors who are sick of Reddit.
Is that accurate?
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.
I don’t think these people actually want to leave reddit. They are only interested in farming karma by complaining about it,
This is a good point. And also reddit is astroturfing hardcore, it’s likely that many comments are coming from botted accounts and especially upvotes are heavily manipulated.
I’m not disagreeing with the fact that a lot of people genuinely struggle to get started on Lemmy. But just pointing out that perception is actively amplified on reddit, because they obviously want to discourage people from joining Lemmy.
It’s not a conspiracy at all, I’ve seen countless positive comments and posts about Lemmy removed over the past year or so. They know about us and they are worried.
Maybe it’s personal bias but I’d put a lot more weight into the comments about
While I understand the power, the ideal of multiple federated servers, I still see it as an impediment for use. I know there’s online descriptions but I fail to see why I need to research and choose a server, especially when none really have the membership to support smaller communities yet
The average person is going to have no idea what “federated” means. They’ll probably assume it has something to do with the federal gov.
The biggest advantage of federated social media is that there’s multiple servers. I know it can be a rough point for new users, but most people can just join whatever the largest server is and they’ll be perfectly fine. You need to pick a server because lemmy isn’t one website, and it shouldn’t be one website. People should be able to host an instance if they disagree with another one’s moderation/rules, and spreading the load across many servers helps to prevent large scale downtime when servers go down. All of these advantages can coexist with new users just being pointed to lemmy.world.
You don’t need to research and choose a server, unless you have personal issues. I get the impression that some people are so polarized they feel like logging into the wrong server would put them on the Wrong Side and make them evil. Just enjoy the content and ignore the complaints about numbers. The concept of multiple servers might keep some people away if they think they need to understand it, but they really don’t.
Maybe better TLDR of how it works will help people realise it doesn’t matter too much which instance they pick
I think people who claim that the UI/UX is fine are missing the point. It is fine to you, but it is not fine to whomever made the claim. And for every person that makes such claim, there are hundreds/thousands who think/feel the same but don’t say anything.
Lemmy, as a community and as a project, should seriously listen more to the opinion of newcomers.
Exactly.
UX is like a Joke, if you need to explain it to someone it’s bad UX
Unexplained choices are extremely frustrating and cause confusion. It would be awesome if people could magically choose the right instance for themselves without being aware that they are making a choice, but that just isn’t realistic.
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?
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?
Likely no. If one person on the instance is subscribed to a remote community, everything is synchronized anyways. If no one is subscribed to the remote community then it’s probably a very small and low activity community anyways, which means it’s a drop in the bucket difference.
So is a large part of lemmy.world cached on sh.itjust.works’ server? Does Pixelfed, Loops or Peertube work the same way? I could see images or video being more of a burden to serve like that. Or does AP sync the metadata like thumbnail, video title, description, comments etc. and the video itself is torrented straight from the host server?
“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?
This is a great point. If it doesn’t matter, why not randomly assign you to an instance? The reality is that it does because some instances are political, and some federate with other instances that could give a negative impression of Lemmy. By people recommending particular instances to sign up to, shows that there’s an element of calculation as to which instance to pick.
Onto your second point, your impact would be negligible. I wouldn’t worry about that scenario.
I could see a “choose for me” button, kind of like installing an OS where you can go with the automatic stuff or set it up yourself. I think you’d need several instances to get with join-lemmy.org to volunteer to be one of the ones that would sign people up for.
Folks who want to sign up for a specific instance in order to create or maybe moderate a community there almost certainly won’t go to join-lemmy.org for that, they’ll just go to that instance.
There may need to be a "Hey could we cool it with the fukpolitik’ agreement to be on that random sign-up list; I’m not sure I’d drop random folks into ex-Hexbear or whatever.
The apps are kinda meh. I haven’t found one that doesn’t come with significant disadvantages yet, and I’ve tried FIVE.
There’s no recommendations feed. You see what you’re subscribed to, or everything. No in-between. You can’t see what you’ve subscribed to, and a few posts that the algorithm thinks you might like. People like to complain about the algorithm, but one reason it’s so addictive is that it’s useful.
Notifications don’t work in every app
Just having a feed that behaves normally seems to be really hard to do for apps. Stop slowing me posts I’ve already scrolled past, and when I click home/pull down to refresh, I want new posts, not the same thing again that I’ve already scrolled past and ignored. Some apps have settings (that are somehow not on by default) to hide read posts and mark posts read on scroll, but I haven’t tried an app where that works every time.
There’s no “main” app. Think about Reddit before the API fees. There used to be a default app. It had its issues, but most features worked out of the box, and most things were intuitive and normie-friendly. You could use that to get comfortable with the social network itself, and then eventually try other apps when something got too annoying.
Compare that with Lemmy. You want to try it, and you already have to deal with choice paralysis. A ton of apps on the website, with utterly unhelpful descriptions (“an open-source Lemmy client developed by so-and-so”; wow, exactly zero of those words help me pick) and a random order that doesn’t even let me default to one most popular one.
Quite a few apps focus on niche UI features like swipe-based navigation while still not having the basics down right. I’m several months into having joined Lemmy and I still haven’t found an app that feels somewhat right. That is a challenge not one of the other social networks has managed. Congrats, Lemmy. Impressive.
Picking a server and signing up in general is complicated. And it’s an impactful decision that you have NO tools to make so early, unless you start researching like it’s school homework.
.world? That’s popular but you’ll be judged for having joined it, plus you lose access to the piracy community. .ml? Hope you like communists and DRAMA. And if you get it wrong, there’s no intuitive and easy way to migrate. You clunkily export your settings and re-import them; the servers will NOT talk to each other. And even then you lose some stuff.
This UX issue is tough. I don’t have an easy solution. But I’m sure a UX expert could find one.
Manual validation of your sign-up by a human. What is this, a Facebook group? If you introduce a 24-hour delay so early in the process, of course people are going to fall off.
The mouse logo is kinda ugly, won’t lie. I’m sure it’s a more potent people repellent than you think.
There is a LOT of tribalism. On Reddit, there’s r/Canada, that’s full of convinced conservatives that won’t hesitate to artificially skew the discourse. And there’s r/OnGuardForThee, basically the same but with progressives angry at the conservatives.
On Lemmy, that feels like the rule, not the exception. I just joined communities based on my interests, and my feed is full of communist vs communist vs non-communist drama. Can we frickin’ chill?
If I need to start filtering out whole fields of interest that were taken over, joining less popular community clones or literally defederating instances to get a good experience, we’ve got it wrong. Normal people don’t wanna do that when they literally just got here. They’ll just leave.
Somehow even more US-centric than Reddit. So… Much… American politics.
it’s ok, it’s a filter
To the guy in here going “UX != UI!!!” Sure, but you can’t design UX, especially for the unwashed masses. “Tried cutting toenails with lawnmower; severed foot. 0/10 bad user experience.”
Lemmy has a “have our cake and eat it too” problem. It offers two mutually exclusive promises:
Each instance is its own independent self-contained little Reddit with their own communities, culture, code of conduct etc. so that individuals can find a place that suits them or make one if none is available, and
All the servers are part of one great big federated system where all users have access to content on all instances so it doesn’t matter which instance you sign up for, you can access it all.
In practice, the former is more or less true, the latter really isn’t.
First there’s the obvious topic of defederation, which makes the “join one server, access all of them” an outright lie. On the one hand, I think everyone here will agree this platform requires defederation to function so that we can kick out instances like lolli.rape or whatever, which thank you admins and mods for dealing with. But what about Hexbear, or Truth Social (which as I understand it is running on Mastodon software). The only honest answer to “where do we draw that line?” is “somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there.”
It is intellectually dishonest to say that Lemmy has this problem and Reddit doesn’t. Post in r/mensrights and an automod bans you from r/twoxchromosomes. Do basically anything anywhere on the platform and get banned from r/conservative. They managed to implement “It’s a different platform depending on who you are” on a monolithic service.
All that crap aside, the average user has a more limited perspective on the rest of the fediverse than his home instance. Often, the UI defaults to viewing only local posts, you have to tell it to give you a global feed. You can browse a list of your local communities, you can browse a list of global communities, you can’t browse a list of communities on a given foreign instance. ‘Show me everything on lemmy.sports’ or indeed ‘show me a list of communities on lemmy.nsfw.’ You cannot create (or moderate?) communities on instances you aren’t a member of. It is, if only slightly, easier to participate on your home instance than elsewhere.
Either your choice of server does matter, or it doesn’t.
If it does matter, we shouldn’t have so many general purpose instances, it should be lemmy.music and lemmy.art and lemmy.uk. Then newcomers are presented a meaningful choice. Are you mostly interested in discussions pertaining to your country? Your hobby? Your career? Sign up here to mostly participate in that, and no matter which you pick you can visit the rest of the Lemmyverse, too."
If it doesn’t matter, then design it such that instances are entirely transparent to users; eliminate the possibility of !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@lemmy.ml coexisting, and make all instances lemmy1.world lemmy2.world, issue credentials centrally and then just spread the load in the background.
I don’t think you can have both at the same time.
I disagree that this is a concern. If you are already exaggerating about federation wars, chances are you already tried lemmy and know a good bit about selecting instances. The average user will not care as much as you do.
The average user will go to join-lemmy site, will not care at all about the different instances and likely choose the biggest one or first one they see. None of them will think “oh no this one is involved in federation wars” because thats not something you find out before knowing some about the fediverse.
When it comes to software things, I do tend to err on the side of supporting new users - I’ll be the first to argue that a person should not have to learn how to use the terminal in order to use Linux.
That said, this situation is honestly bewildering to me. I cannot fathom how the idea of having choices could be considered, let alone by so many people to even make this into a controversy, to be bad design. That’s the very thing that makes federation great.
You’re all seriously overthinking this. Just look at a few of the most populated sites, and pick one that looks good. The choice makes 95% no difference in practice because on most instances you’re going to see all the same content as soon as you press the All button anyway.
One thing I can imagine that would make the experience better, is maybe if there was a one-click way to join or migrate to another lemmy instance, using an existing login. Personally I don’t think it’s a big deal to just quickly sign up for a new instance if I want to. But I did see that Pixelfed has the option of signing on by using a Mastodon account. So maybe something like that can help?
How can people figure out email, but lemmy is just too complicated?
feels like old reddit
They obviously haven’t visited old.lemmy.world
I am very new here, and not as passionate about the fediverse as some of you are (like your average redditor most likely).
Reading the comments here I think that the fact that you notice decentralization as a user can be a problem for many but offering simple instance lists, community lists in the UI can mitigate that and make it more a feature than a nuisance (for those that have trouble navigating it).
On desktop, I don’t mind switching servers with different URLs, especially since I can read them all with the same proton UI. However, on mobile (I spend more time on social media via mobile than desktop, I imagine most people do these days) using the Jerboa app I cannot figure out how to “visit” another server. I can’t enter the URL, I cannot click on the URL, I cannot search for @URL and get a list of the communities hosted on it…
I am sure there is documentation somewhere explaining how I achieve this, but I should not have to look for that just to acces different instances. I use lemmy on breaks mostly and as I said, am not passionate enough about social media to read manpages for it… I imagine some will think “then we don’t need people like you here”, but in the end if close-to mainstream user adoption is a goal, you kind of will need people who just want to look at cats and discover communities as well, and making jumping between instances and finding communities is an important part of making that happen.
I sincerely hope there’s less content here than Reddit, forever. I hope the UI keeps the masses out, and the technically savy are the only ones here.
I want to doomscroll less, I want to be astroturfed less. I want to interact with more humans and fewer bots, even when that means I interact less. I want fewer AI prompts, AI Art and corpo spam ads masquerading as engagement. I want less video and more text. Overall, I want to be spending less time on the internet, on my phone, and I don’t want to hear about every last toxic thing Trump did to drive me crazy. Lemmy helps me control that feed better, so I deleted my reddit account and I hope to stay here until I manage to stop opening social media at all.
Lemmy right now feels like the internet before the long september. I hope it never changes.
Good UI (in my android app) is the reason I came to Lemmy.
Leave the micropenis guys alone, it’s already a shit card to be dealt.
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.
Uh yeah. I’ve got no clue how to find new communities? Instances? Groups? Whatever the hell the equivalent of a subreddit is called. It’s not user friendly at all.
I said it before and I’ll say it again, Lemmy’s (and Mastodon’s) issue is that the users experience is influenced by the defederation.
The server side needs to be a decentralized database stored on a bunch of servers with all content available from one website with an API so people can develop apps for it, but otherwise the decentralization should have zero impact on what content the users have access to. In other words, do like Reddit but instead of having a ton of servers owned by AWS hosting everything, have those servers be owned by anyone who wants to host part of the database.
Whether these are just lazy excuses or not, but let’s be real for a moment.
Imagine someone, who’s used to go to reddit.com, search for a reddit app in the app store, both of which have the same logo, design, etc… and use their username/password to login and browse the content.
almost every service, that people use for the last decades is based on this specific approach, except for emails. Even the TLD was always .com
Now imagine, how overwhelmed those people might feel, when you tell them “just come over to lemmy”.
Lemmy, where? lemmy.com? Here’s where you than start explaining the different instances, federation, etc…
the next question will be: where’s the Lemmy app? Remember, the unified logo and design? well, good luck explaining that all lemmy apps are de facto third-party-apps.
Now, once they make it throug all of that, the next hurdle that will confuse the hell out of them are the communities scattered all across the instances.
FilthyShrooms@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yea getting into Lemmy is confusing. I only use sync because it’s easier, I have no idea how to even access it on desktop. It definitely needs some QoL improvements before I can really start recommending it to people
Allero@lemmy.today 2 months ago
To access it on desktop, just open the browser and type your server’s URL (in your case, lemmy.world)
I guess we have to roll back from “apps for everything”, or else many people might genuinely not know how to access their instance.
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
There are people who don’t realize that reddit is a website. Stew on that for a minute.
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Jerboa?
secretlyaddictedtolinux@lemmy.world 2 months ago
There is a reason such a large Parr of Lemmy is developers. There’s no confusion signing up for the developers. Federations and servers and instances are all crazy jargon to regular people. Although we may not want all regular types here, having some more regular people to balance out all the high IQ techies could make things more fun.
Binette@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Tbf I think it takes just a little web litteracy to understand the fediverse. I know I’m a developper, so I tried explaining it to my bro and he got it on the first try.