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?
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)
So they want to replace a social media site ran by rich fucks with a social media site run by rich fucks?
The UI isn’t the problem? The attached screenshot shows people talking about federation. Federation is very confusing, but also the core part of how the Fediverse functions. The only thing you could to is to provide an entry portal, where all servers are categorized by the type of content they provide and you can check and uncheck the type of content you want or might want to interact with. Based on your choices, the portal could recommend a random Lemmy or Mbin instance that has a track record of being reliable and allows you to interact with most content of that type. So if you’d want to see porn for example, the portal should choose an instance that is federated with lemmynsfw.
The UI is fine, you can use Photon or other modern UI’s
The UX is the problem (User Experience), the defaults just suck and many will give up before even knowing better UI’s exist, or finding the right settings to make the default UI work for them.
Just picking a instance is intimidating and many will give up before that, we should guide them to pick an instance or choose a default and give them the option to change.
we should guide them to pick an instance or choose a default and give them the option to change.
Isn’t that what most people are doing nowadays?
Well, when I started to use lemmy I had a few problems:
I do think lemmy is worthwhile and can be fun, but as a reddit alternative it has already failed. You cannot purge insanity by splitting it up into smaller insanlets. That’s just schizophrenia.
What are those?
limbrols
I tried to join a community that was meant to migrate away from reddit, but found two duplicates. So I wasn’t sure which one was the correct one. Ultimately the migration failed, even though it was a software oriented community
Which community was it?
Your #4 seems inaccurate, unless you were just walking us through your changing perspective as you joined.
This place is very left leaning and I’m sure it’s loaded with people who happily call themselves socialists while shouting down the MLs/tankies.
The main difference afaik is that they support authoritarians.
Lemmy has little reactionary people, but your definitions on who is authoritarian or who or what is “good” or “evil” have been manufactured by the mainstream media.
If you ever wonder on how to prevent foreign or capitalist interference into elections and mainstream social media, you will find yourself looking to China and Russia for inspiration.
Instead Lemmy has cut off any dissent from the actual socialists, those who oppose the systems that created the conditions for the rise of neofascism. People can’t even imagine or tolerate other ways of managing power. Therefor Lemmy is a failure.
When the Orcs are raping elderly women and their sons. Then murdering them. They deserve the name. Just so you’re aware. There’s a reason they are called this. They earned it.
You can use extreme examples about any group, like black americans, or chinese, japanese or vietnamese enemies and then use derogatory names for the whole group.
Doing that is called racism. Example: You’re a racist, like a nazi. Since we’re on lemmy, all lemmy users are nazis. See how stupid that is to say?
Once a war starts, law and order goes out the window and war crimes are inevitable, as well as awful death and destruction and untold suffering.
And Russia is not solely responsible for starting this war. Should others who helped to start it not be held accountable?
Also, the civilian death toll in the Ukraine war is still lower than the death toll in gaza or the (second) iraq invasion. It’s also hypocritical to dehumanize Russians but not USArians.
Who volunteers to fix it?
Who cares? If someone can’t figure out how to join a server, then I don’t want them here. If people think that reddit has some amazing UX, then I don’t want them here.
The post about Lemmy has 500 upvotes while the crybaby replies only have like 100.
I don’t want anyone staying on Reddit tbh
The question is: do we want people to leave corporate services, and join the fediverse, or not? By showing such hostility towards such “crybabies” we will never get any traction.
We are facing a problem. “Crybabies” are arguing about lack of content and/or difficulty on signing up. People on Lemmy are arguing that they don’t want such users in their communities. Other people, thinking of onboarding, may not join after seeing hostile users like you.
…and the fediverse doesn’t need to dominate all social media. Period.
You’ll never be able to migrate the IG influencer whose affiliate marketing business relies on the algorithm, or the Titkok million views dude who makes money off their views and lives. So I really don’t understand this argument of “Oh we’re alienating mass users”.
Just like there’s non-profit orgs vs businesses, open source software vs commerical ones, there also fediverse vs commercial social media. I prefer it here, and to each their own.
we can redesign the on onboarding process.
🛑 stop explaining new terms 🛑 fuck infinite list of random names with anime girls (what do you want me to do,read!?)
Make it like a map and turn instances into buildings (or gardens/circle/doesnt matter). Show some stats like how big, who i can talk to, topic. Gamify the experience so the fatigue turns into curiousity.
That’s a cool idea
Imagine sending your friend a minigame and you accidentally sign him up for lemmy
I do like the idea of a map.
We have colonized the Internet it’s probably about time we start making a map for those that follow.
Endless wars about federations. Ha, so true. Along with switching to Linux and Privacy.
Are there endless wars? A lot of people don’t like .ml, lemmygrad, and hexbear and they’re defederated by a lot of instances, but that’s not really a hot war. Outside of that most drama seems to be about certain mod/admin decisions. But that kind of feedback loop is by design. People are supposed to have opinions on whether they think instances are well run and aligns with what they’re looking for…and if it doesn’t align, that would be a good reason to switch instances. I see more fretting over how to make Lemmy more popular than arguments about instances.
The problem is trying to get people into “Lemmy”, where they have to understand federation and choose an instance, etc - instead of trying to get people into a specific instance. I know you don’t want one bloated instance, but if that was the mission it would be a lot easier to get people on board.
It’s depressing how many top level comments or replies are about how people like that there is a technical barrier gatekeeping lemmy. Are yall actually leftists or do you just pretend to be while worshipping your own version of social hierarchy in which us nerds are on top?
I had no idea I wasn’t actually seeing the front page of everything
A solution to this is, actually, more federation. Many lemmy instances could band together by building a front page interface that combined all of the best posts across servers
Isn’t that All?
If I understand it correctly you want something like what Mastodon has, splitting “your stream” and “world stream”, being the second the default one. Am I right?
More federation is good, but lemmy had a defederation fiasco when everyone was paying attention.
People have enough of that IRL and want a truly global community.
“bad ux? bad ui?” i am a graphic designer!!! i only use linux and open source software like inkscape!! yea let’s go!! fediverse
And they don’t have to join. I really don’t mean this in a dismissive way and respect their opinion. But why all this worrying about the need to have the fediverse dominate all social media? Maybe it’s meant to be this way: your vibe decides your tribe. My vibe isn’t commercial, toxic political talk, or influencers, thus my tribe is the fediverse instead of IG or Tiktok.
Even worse, the Tankies are basically running the landing page that asks them which instance to join.
We should probably make a non-tankie version and get it trending for the Algorithm.
Ah yes, the US is being run by a fascist pedophile and his 4 techbros of the apocalypse, but lets focus on the tankies because clearly they are the real problem haha.
Tankies promoted that fascist pedophile, literally promoted him on Hexbear and praised him, and regularly promote both-sides-bad centrism that empowers him.
Is this a poll result or an opinion? Because I like the Lemmy UX a lot better than reddit.
Its so nice tho, all the alternative front ends are fire, I like all the ios apps, I prefer it to reddits garbage, they made it worse every update down to forcing answers to take up a tab in the last one
I feel like probably the biggest UX improvement Lemmy, and the fediverse more widely, could do is to make user migration more seamless. I’m thinking federated SSO, basically, where once you have an account anywhere on the fediverse you should a) be able to use that account anywhere else in the fediverse and b) move where that account is hoested to anywhere else in the fediverse.
I believe this is related to whatever the hell ActivityPod is doing? Feel free to correct me on that. Regardless, get something like this in place as well as better instance and services discovery (and maybe the ability to find your other connected services from you ‘account’ pages on whatever service you’re on) and I think people might start to think of fediverse as less ‘an alternative’ and more ‘the better one’.
Basically, we need standard protocols for user data management, transfer, credentials management, and service and instance discovery. I’m sure some of that exists, the important thing will be to streamline and standardise the actual UX.
Tell them to download the thunder app (it’s very similar to many of the popular reddit apps) and just give them a list of the 10 most popular fediverse’s to pick from to make an account.
I mentioned this like a year ago. Users will need their hands held to get them to easily come over.
Hot take - I don’t blame them. The who’s federated with who and who can see what, and how it works is confusing as absolute fuck and extremely poorly explained.
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)
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.
Unlike twitter, if there are UI issues, people have a lot of options to try different clients, both mobile and web. I don’t use one only, I flip between a bunch of them, both on web and mobile. Sometimes the vanilla Lemmy experience is what you want, other times someone might have made a great ui for browsing one specific community that you subscribe to.
I’m also somewhere against the argument of it being difficult to pick a server, too difficult to know if it’s the right one for me, etc etc. In other parts of life, people make decisions on this all the time, day in day out, without batting an eyelid, and even on issues with a bigger impact on them, than which federated instans they sign up to a service on. Mobile phone subscriptions, which email provider you should use, what internet provider you should sign up with.
For some reason, social media seems to be one of these areas where we think it’s totally fine that monopolies exist, and options are not… an option. We need to resocialise the idea that it doesn’t hurt to make a conscious choice about where you lay your identity online, and what you sink your time and attention into.
I don’t know, feddit.nl is pretty chill. I always see everything and barely anything objectable
OP, FYI I pinged you on this post but it was probably drown in the replies to your posts: lemm.ee/post/55244676
If you want to try out your approach (Photon as default, probably some communities hidden from the All feed), feel free to create a community dedicated to that project. You can probably promote it here and on a few other communities. The biggest challenge is probably going to find an admin wanting to give this a try.
I wanted to do something similar a months ago ( lemm.ee/post/52588852 ), but no admin was interested. Maybe you’ll have more luck.
Thank you I appreciate all the input, I won’t have the time or energy to drive something like that. I can get behind a cause like that and help push it, but won’t be able to lead.
I’d love a place where there is no politics, it might also be appealing to many and I think it should be the default.
Then you probably hit the main issue. Everyone’s time is limited.
Lots of Lemmy clients have great UI. The default web interface looks fine as well.
Wait till they try out Matrix. No client works properly and all the mobile clients are really bad.
Good.
Lemmy doesn’t need low bar registrations. Lemmy will grow slowly without the immaturities and the to pompous class.
People will build apps and make lemmy more “fun”
Corporate social media is easy because it keeps the ad clickers there. Do we really want that environment here?
All the quality (non bait clicking content suppliers) will come here and all the spam artists will stay over there.
Just let Lenny grow organically with a little barrier to climb and we’ll be alright
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 2 months ago
More flaming about tankies and .ml that will help.
ABSTRACT AWAY THE FEDERATION!