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?
It’s really no more difficult than filling out a job application or something.
Why do we want more users? Because lemmy is insufferable. Im here, like many others, waiting for an alternative to reddit and hoping im already there.
No we dont need gatekeeping based on a users understanding federated servers. We need more people so the smaller communities actually have posts and we dont need to scroll the dumpster fire that is “everything”.
Have you tried piefed.social ? Compatible with Lemmy (allows you to import your subscriptions list actually) and with a different approach: join.piefed.social/blog/
I dont know what you are talking about. What subscriptions am i adding to where?
It’s why my less “tech savvy” friends won’t join. They don’t understand what federation is, and No they don’t want to take 2 minutes to learn.
It’s annoying, but it’s reality. People don’t understand the whole different servers thing, federation, and how to pick one.
I realize marketing isn’t a strong suit (nor should it be), but I’m proposing two solutions (well maybe not solutions, but something to help):
A quick animated video showing the benefits of Lemmy and how this all works (if it hasn’t already been done yet)
A service that basically simplifies and centralizes the signup process to one screen. During server selection, users can see the most populated servers and click on them to learn the specific rules for the server, etc.
Idk, maybe we already have all this…or this is just complicating the issue. Or maybe we only want people willing to take 2 minutes to learn about how it all works. Tbh that’s a pretty good natural filter for the types of users I want to be interacting and discussing with.
Agree. It’s not about being smug or entitled or whatever. Getting a simple lemmy client on your phone and signing up for the most basic instances takes literally 5 minutes of reading tops. And that’s for non tech savvy readers. If you can’t put 5 minutes of effort into an online discussion forum setup, then how can you be expected to put even 5 minutes of effort into a discussion post or in reading an article before commenting?
It’s a natural filter indeed. And a good one at that. Keep the short attention spanners who need tiktok level ease of use on reddit.
Try not caring. The more Reddit users come here the more it’s going to suck.
This is just bot-driven FUD anyway, Lemmy is nothing like old Reddit and it wouldn’t be disqualifying if it was.
Lemmy only really became usable for me after I blocked certain instances/communities. Tbh if I wasn’t permabanned from Reddit I probably would have quit early on and went back to Reddit.
This wasn’t because of UX. It’s was because some of the most active and highly upvoted instances that had posts hit All costly were full of terrible people and idiots.
However now that I realize how powerful that is to be able to block whole instances and curate your experience and realize that it’s basically impossible to Permaban someone from Lemmy, I’m enjoying it a lot more.
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
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
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.
Well yeah, which server do they want to join? Maybe sample servers that reset every day would be useful?
I remember being curious about the fediverse and when I first looked and saw “instances” I got decision fatigue.
I didn’t know if an instance would limit me from interacting with others, could randomly disappear (ie hexbear domain), or if some instances would be a bad fit. I also didn’t know of it was unchangeable. Decision fatigue set in and I was less excited, but still registered.
To overcome that, there should be a “randomly choose for me” button with notes next to it that say you can change later, it won’t impact things, and you can interact with any instance. For random selection, just make it the top 3 most popular instances. Use a fun icon to indicate random change so the on boarding user has to think less.
Instances seem very confusing to an average user, as does federation. There could be an explanation like "Instead of 1 big company controlling everything, there are many copies of Lemmy that are in different places run by volunteers. These “instances” or copies are all Lemmy and can interact with each other, but having many copies means there isn’t ever 1 big company who can set all the rules and suddenly change thing in a bad way. " and then the random selection button which almost everyone would choose.
The average user dosn’t want to RTFM and also has an IQ of around 100 which is really low. The average reading ability of someone in the USA is like 6th grade level or something atrocious. You can’t overestimate average intelligence in an in boarding process.
you can change later
You won’t bring everything over
it won’t impact things
Lies! It will impact a LOT of things. Primarily your admins and federation. How could you possibly say that changing servers allows you to pick different admins (which is a good thing) but then say that the server doesn’t matter? Plus there’s server culture.
you can interact with any instance
Depends what server you’re on
These things don’t affect the average user (lurker) much at all. Ideally you just start with whatever instance and only move if you don’t like it. A new user can’t really know if an instance is bad or not before trying it.
(As long as there recommendation page doesn’t give them an extremist instance)
Nothing, this seems like a good thing, I don’t want them here if they literally cannot even comprehend the concept of different servers, though somehow no one has this issue with discord even though it’s dogshit, almost as if they just yearn for the corporate boot.
With discord, though, the “server” part is largely hidden from the user or at least transparent - that’s the thing. It simplifies the same concept into something more tangible.
Lmao, so true. Buhh my user experience!! As if consuming endless amounts of garbage on reddit is a good experience.
Based.
Don’t over think it, the people who want to be here will be.
Unpopular opinion maybe but I like Lemmy and lemmy users and I’m glad that we’re a bit different from Reddit. At least in my experience it feels a bit different.
Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media (which Reddit is). Without attracting new users Lemmy will almost certainly perish. It’s goal should be a low bar to onboard new social media users coming from places like Reddit, Facebook, X.
Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.
Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media
Lemmy is a protocol for networking individual privately hosted social media instances. It is not a panacea for corporate control of social media infrastructure. You’re still hosting these sites on AWS / Azure / some other large corporately controlled private hardware setup. You’re still securing the URL from a private DNS. You’re still paying for these sites out of the surplus of a handful of wealth(ier) patrons and their friendly donors (or ending up like Hexbear.net, with a domain name up for grabs because it was mismanaged by part time broke amateurs).
Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.
There’s not a lot we can do about it individually. I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP’s image’s “this is too weird and scary” attitude.
If popping into the Fediverse and just picking a Lemmy instance was as straightforward as selecting “Communities I’m interested in” on other bigger social media feeds, the onboarding would be smoother. But if you poke around and see people going whole hog frothing at the mouth “Everyone on <instance>.<whatever> is morally degenerate and has ruined the community at large!!!” reactionary in between instances, that’s an immediate turn off that I don’t think anyone within the Lemmy network knows how to deal with.
Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit, just ported into a more decentralized network. And it neglects the fundamentals of modern web hosting (we’re all at the mercy of the IANA / Cloudflare, etc / the major hosting companies).
Lemmy is, itself, a shortsighted patch on a much larger and scarier problem. The instance infighting only reveals how shortsighted.
If a small, one time pop-up designed to solve your problem makes you give up on solving your problem then you were never going to solve that problem.
You can’t do anything because these excuses are window dressing and not the core of the issue. The core of the issue is that 99% of people are incredibly unwilling to change their habits or spend five minutes to wrap their heads around how websites work. If the question of which server to join is too much, this kind of space isn’t for you.
No, having a full time job or a family is not an excuse to not learn how computers or the internet or networks in general work. You’ve had a lifetime to learn and are willfully ignorant.
Im personally fine with basic competence and tech literacy to be a natural gate keeping the unwashed morons out. Lemmy is growing at a fine pace without catering to the lowest common denominators.
it feels like old reddit
As someone who exclusively used old.reddit.com, this isn’t actually a bad thing.
Also apps for the mobile experience, and I want to say alexandrite for the desktop experience?
Yeah if it looked like new reddit I wouldn’t be here. That site is ass. IDK how anyone can stand to use it.
This is intentional. There’s a contingent of Lemmy power users who are actively sabotaging a push to make it more accessible. Every time this comes up, they openly admit their intentions are to keep it niche, and continue gatekeeping.
If that’s true then the problem will solve itself when Mbin or PieFed overtakes Lemmy. The content will be there anyways, we just need to see who brings the best UX/UI
Hopefully some instances will move away from that thinking and not gatekeep
I use the Boost app for Lemmy so it basically feels exactly like the ideal Reddit experience felt back then, which is fantastic.
As for being put off, the only thing that really bothers me is the extreme hatred for Windows and the deepthroating of Linux. It’s creepy.
Like, I love Linux and use it for many things alongside Windows, but I don’t get obsessively weird about it to the point of creating memes or going out of my way to tell people why they’re wrong for using one over the other, you know?
If that were toned down I’d certainly feel a little more relaxed, but on the whole the Lemmy experience has been lovely <3
Have you tried blocking some communities?
I use eternity, used infinity beforehand so it basically felt like no change when migrating (eternity is a lemmy fork of infinity)
Someone advocating for bells and whistles will get eaten alive here. Too many people would rather read their feed on a git terminal. The pushback would be worse than the community drama!
There are aspects that could be better, sure. I think communities should be like sets of posts, subject to unions, conjuctions, and other set operations. Then you wouldnt have the issue of 5 versions of c/memes, they could be virtually joined into one memes community at the user level (and the user can filter out instances icon unities risers they don’t like of course). Moderation could be decoupled from communities and made a broader service that users choose to interact with, agreeing to a level of moderation comfortable for their experience.
But also, put me in the group that thinks lemmy should stay small. Corpo social has convinced us that a single big room with every idiot and literally their mother screaming into it is how the internet should be and it isn’t. We can go back to smaller, focused online communities that don’t openly invite everyone to come in and fight.
Centralization tendencies are all rooted in power and control. We need to fragment more.
Lemmy is supposed to be the best of both worlds. Smaller internet communities not owned by big corpos and federated together.
they could be virtually joined into one memes community at the user level
Good luck with !politics from LW, hexbear and feddit.org colliding
I think two communities could have a consensual federation - where posts from each community shows up in each community’s feed.
Facebook has servers all over the world; there’s not just one Facebook server although it appears to users like that. What would be the effect of asking (potential) Facebook users which server they would like to join?
In a somewhat related question, does anyone know how the extra-instance account transfer request is going? Not sure where to look to find out.
extra-instance account transfer request is going?
You mean settings or content?
Settings have been exportable for a while now.
Content cannot be and probably never will. Even Mastodon doesn’t allow it:
Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.
Thank-you.
I was hoping that the content would be id linked to a user id so that moving an account would remain linked to the content if moved between instances.
It’s not an inconceivable expectation for when instances close down or people find that the instance doesn’t suit them.
Is that the case?
Something else to keep in mind is that most Redditors nowadays (like Twitter and Bluesky users) are mobile users. I think a lot of Lemmy mobile apps have a good UI and solve that problem. However, it’s hard to point new users at a single website/app/etc to join. Bluesky does that. Obviously, that’s bad for decentralization, but Bluesky is also still a beta protocol that’s headed toward decentralization at some point. Their single instance was necessary for them at the start.
When a new/small social media platform that acts as an alternative of a bigger platform pops up, one of the common topics on the alternative are people talking about how it’s better than the old place and/or just trashing the old place. Eventually, they outgrow that (assuming that platform survives). I feel like that’s happened with Bluesky. Browsing it, everyone seems to be talking about their own usual topics now, and I see very few posts calling out Twitter or comparing Bluesky to Twitter nowadays.
Lemmy still feels like it’s in that “bash the old place” stage to me. Maybe ~20% or posts I see are talking about Reddit or talking about Lemmy in relation to Reddit. It’s annoying.
Maybe ~20% or posts I see are talking about Reddit or talking about Lemmy in relation to Reddit. It’s annoying.
People talk about Reddit now due to the influx last week.
Usually Reddit isn’t that discussed.
So they want to replace a social media site ran by rich fucks with a social media site run by rich fucks?
Honestly, if picking a server is too difficult, how have you survived this long? It’s literally like picking an email host. That’s the UX people are complaining about. How far have we fallen that making a choice is now a problem? “Pick what you like” leads to people going “OMG, this is terrible, I have to make my own decisions😭😭” No wonder people love AI, because they can’t think for themselves.
The only improvement would be setting a default or giving them themes to choose from which they are interested in and selecting a server for them based on that.
Isn’t this why apple is popular. It just picks everything for you.
I think the most important part to understand with lemmy is that the choice of server doesn’t matter that much because you can read and post on all the other servers as well. Unless you choose hexbear or whatever it is called these days. :)
But it really is a problem when people can’t be bothered to choose from more than exactly one. I mean if you can make a selection from several different brands of toilet paper in a supermarket then why is it so hard to choose a server?
My point exactly. How do you function in life if choice is too much for you to comprehend? Maybe people just need a website called Lemmy.org that redirects them to a random approved server and that’s it. “UX” problem solved.
I think it’s less about ux and more about being confused. People aren’t faking being confused. I’m pretty tech savvy but had to do a double take. Still don’t fully understand the nuances of federation after over a year and a half. I don’t really need to understand all of it though.
What’s there to understand? Does the average person understand that reddit consists of a frontend written in a frontend framework that compiles to HTML, CSS, and JS? Do they understand that HTTPS is used to make the request between the client and server on port 443? Do they know that the request is processed by a back end connecting to postgresql and redis or memcache for faster responses? That most assets are probably delivered by a CDN?
Probably not. And why should they? They don’t need to understand how the fediverse works, nor do they have to understand how email works. All they need to do is select a server, create an account, and start interacting. Same as email.
There’s no mystery. The fediverse isn’t complicated unless you freak out and start realising that the entire internet is more complicated than the shiny, glossy thing on top of it - which doesn’t need to be understood to have simple interactions with.
Have you ever been on Facebook? Ever read the illiterate moronic uneducated garbage that people post as fact? It’s called ‘my truth’; maybe because it’s only true in their sphere (of one).
There are going to be a seriously large number of people totally flummoxed by that question.
If selecting a server is too much, then directing them to a random on that fits their criteria should solve the problem. Which joinlemmy, joinmastodon, joinoixelfed, and so on do.
If even that is too much, then I’m totally fine without those people as I question what kind of stuff they’ll be saying.
And this isn’t even elitist. It’s not “you have to have the ActivityPub spec memorised” or even know what ActivityPub is. It’s like “which email host should I pick”. No deeper than that.
If Facebook and Apple have eroded people’s brains to the point where such a simple question cannot be answered without freaking out, then we’re in trouble.
Couldn’t we design an “onboarder” where when you get started on lemmy, a “let’s get you started” wizard asks you 2 or 3 questions and based on your answers, it proposes 2 or 3 servers (or directly assigns you to one)?
Join-lemmy suggests outdated and defederated instances: lemmy.world/post/24220536
The problem here is that those are filters, and the newcomer will usually still be faced with several options, which will still make them scratch their head.
A wizard is a good idea, with simple questions, rather than filter buttons.
But it needs to end up telling you “here you go, this is the one you want!”, giving you just a single instance. Doesn’t matter that multiple will probably match the answers given - then just pick one at random. Chances are, they will be equally happy on either, and if not, well, it isn’t very hard to switch to a new instance later on, when they have become regular Lemmists.
Thanks for sharing! Very much aligned with what i have in mind… Only difference would be to narrow down to 1 or 2 (if at all) on the landing screen - maybe all other options are under a “advanced user? Click here to expand server selection” or something like that…
Something like this sounds great
Love old.lemmy.world
Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
I thought that when I first joined, as the weeks pass, its turned into a no, I like the community here, reddit is just a headache that I was addicted to
Yeah… you people are nice. Thank you all fr it’s so refreshing and rare to meet nice people on the internet these days
thats how it got shitty, you get thousands of pointless comments, reposts and bot accounts upvoted to the front page
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.
If you mention Lemmy, point someone towards a specific instance so it’s not so much of a shock. Then they can slowly learn about what it is.
I’ll be ditching reddit completely after 16th of April. Till then I’m slowly doing my migration. Lemmy is awesome.
That happened to me in the reddit exodus, I switched to Lemmy and faced a lot of analysis paralysis, ended up in Lemmy.world out of spite and then I regretted my decision.
Arkhive@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
I’m going to be holding a teach-in about the fediverse. AFK I mean. Like the people I live with, and am in community with in meat space. They all want to ditch corpo social media, but aren’t sure how. I’ll hold a digital one too for my more extended community, but I want to start with the people I truly live with. I think word of mouth is a great way to onboard people as it allows for a dynamic level of handholding. This is essentially “grassroots” social media after all.
I don’t really want Reddit to join Lemmy en masse. I want the people that see the value of pre-2010 social media, and the “local” internet, to understand and have access to these tools and spaces. I think that will be best done through education, not advertising. Advertising the platform is exactly what all the platforms we want to ditch do, and we are actively trying to not be those platforms.
The sense of “needing” more users, to me at least, is a hold out of the “infinite growth”, capitalist, mindset. I don’t want infinite growth for my instance, I want the people it’s made for to find it, and enjoy communicating with the people they share it with.
AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee 1 year ago
We need more users for those small spaces to grow, one of the reasons I still use Reddit alongside Lemmy is that there is no ‘South African’ community on here, there is a very alive and fun South African community on reddit, that alone will make me keep using Reddit.
I’m sure that’s true for many other niche communities, for those to take hold in Lemmy we need numbers.
Arkhive@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Absolutely! Growth is important and not every possible community is mirrored on the fediverse. But if anything this is all the more reason for interpersonal connections to drive new user growth. That will naturally help filter users to instances they align with. I’m considering going so far as to host an instance specifically for my geographical area to really lean into the idea of a “local” internet.
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Cool for you to do a presentation. Feel free to share how it went here afterwards!