Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy

⁨1070⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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?

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Comments

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JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Gonna don my tinfoil hat here for a second…

Was the monetization of the API a deliberate move to kick out the progressive and tech-literate long-time reddit users (myself included, with 16 year badge and centuryclub), to in turn make the site more of a Nazi, pro-Trump circle jerk?

Because I really think it succeeded. The whole atmosphere shifted that day, and I’ve barely been back except when I end up there out of muscle memory or a Google result…and those often have the best answers removed by someone who went through and scrubbed their account.

We all remember how Spez treated r/thedonald, right?

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- Glitchvid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Regardless if it was the plan, it’s the result.
  
  I can’t stand what it has become, especially when some of the most problematic subs have massive influence over the rest of the site, like wsb.
  
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  - boxfulloffoxes@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I just wish you had recourse for false (or maybe even correct, but heavy handed) bans, and it’s still the largest gathering place for many communities - retro games, queer communities, other adult interest (not just pornography) spaces, local events/happenings, so it’s really terrible to just be completely shut out of all of that. Whether voluntarily or not. (In my case not.)
    
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- Snapz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I have a post early on Lemmy, around the migration, about how it felt like any morality and responsibility to objective fact over there left with our initially migrating group. The change is subtle, but it’s crazy how far you have to scroll into the comments now to find the buried correct answer that refutes the misinformation in the title or linked article.
  
  Also, the “which movie is this for you?” Type posts have just saturated over there. As well as shit, obscure linked sources (e g. “Indiatrump.biz” “realzgovtruth.info” kind of shit), as sources of front page upvoted posts, seem so much more prevalent over there now.
  
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SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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- slightlytonedeaf@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  You need to give people the photon link: photon.lemmy.world
  
  Lemmy has multiple view options, photon is the one that looks the most/exactly like Reddit.
  
  The other view options are; a.lemmy.world - Alexandrite UI photon.lemmy.world - Photon UI m.lemmy.world - Voyager mobile UI old.lemmy.world - A familiar UI
  
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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Have tell new users just sign up on your instance. Make it less confusing by sending them to a specific website and not just telling them about the software.

I swear to God, there are so many tech people here that overthink it because they know details that the average user would not give a single fuck about.

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- boxfulloffoxes@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  This exactly. Once I dove in and stopped reading, it oddly made more sense to me.
  
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- LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Create username and password Sign into preferred app from your favorite store.
  
  I liked old reddit, and Baconreader, so for me Jerboa was great
  
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  - lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Jerboa is awesome, and it’s come a very long way in a really short timespan.
    
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- spicehoarder@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I like my instantce
  
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SparrowHawk@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Do you really want mass appeal right now? Just be patient, build good information and ppl will come

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- AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  We already have good information, the barrier to entry just needs to be lowered
  
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  - madjo@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I respectfully disagree. Reddit went downhill and significantly more difficult to manage/moderate when the masses joined.
    
    If people aren’t willing to invest a bit of time to understand how Lemmy works (and it’s really not that difficult to understand), then I don’t think Lemmy is a good fit for them.
    
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evilcultist@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
It should have an account creation process like those old RPGs where it asks a series of questions then says, “we recommend this server: <blah>. It is <one short sentence about its content>” then has click next to proceed or click “I want to choose another server” to just get a list.

1-hate, 5-love Do you like capitalism? Do you like tech? Do you like sports? etc

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TeraByteMarx@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I’ve decided this is good and want a Lemmy that is restricted to just the nerdiest of nerds. These little spaces are cool without all those horrible reddit users.

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- piecat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  The less profitable we are, the less they’ll bother us.
  
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  - Flumpkin@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    The closer we are to irrelevance, the farther we are from harm!
    
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- AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I like this idea! I still don’t see how the more narrowly focussed servers would benefit me. I went with Lemmy.world because size matters in a forum, and the admins have been outstanding with reliability. The most likely reason for me to jump ship would be if that reliability fell.
  
  That being said when I was new I had no idea what hexbear was or Lemmy.ml or whatever, and there’s only so much a description can do. I know the difference after reading many discussion threads
  
  But I so would have jumped on Lemmy.nerds over Lemmy.jocks or Lemmy.preppies. Multiple servers with clearer sub communities may help make onboarding easier. That being said, I realize I could just do that if I wanted to. I also realize that may just amplify lift the echo chamber effect
  
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- Rawdogthatexe@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  This is why I like SomethingAwful forums too. Open since 1999 and an account costs $10. Just a little barrier to entry keeps out the worst people and trolls help fund the site by reregistering!
  
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- Zink@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Part of me wants the fediverse to take over because the world needs open systems and not corporate outlets for ads and propaganda.
  
  But this place is really fun how it is and I want to be selfish and keep the precious all for ourselves.
  
  I think we have a lot of wiggle room between the two, fortunately. If we get 10x the users with the barriers to entry doing the same filtering as now, this place could really be hopping. But if we get 1000x the users and start doing Reddit numbers, who knows what it will be like.
  
  Knowing humans, maybe there’s a critical mass at which Lemmy would fracture into multiple fediverse islands. But each could still be vastly larger than all of Lemmy right now.
  
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blackn1ght@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
The biggest UX issues, in my opinion, is the process of choosing an instance and content discovery.

When you go to “join lemmy”, rather than choosing a username, you’re presented a big list of instances, and you have no idea what that means and what it means for your experience if you choose one. Even though in reality it doesn’t really matter, just having the list paraylyses the user as it’s not a process they’re used to. Users are likely asking themselves:

Am I going to miss out on content from other instances?

Do I need an account per instance to interact with their communities?

Sometimes I think it would be best if we could have some kind of read-only instance people can create an account on and get stuck in first, then choose an instance to sign up to once they understand it. The instance would be locked down so they couldn’t create any communities. So basically when they they’re directed to join-lemmy and go to sign up, they create an account on that instance right away and get started.
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- Kichae@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  People need to stop sending people to “join ___” sites. I get why they are, or at least were, necessary, but they’re totally superfluous when users are making recommendations to other users.
  
  Just recommend a website for them to join. Word of mouth + systematized signup makes zero sense.
  
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  - blackn1ght@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    Just recommend a website for them to join.
    
    But the crux is which one do you recommend? We don’t want to send everyone to the same instance otherwise it’ll end up becoming dominant (see Lemmy World).
    
    Ideally we shouldn’t need to go through this motion of trying to work out which instance to choose or recommend one for them, they should be able to do that themselves after getting their feet wet.
    
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- Coelacanth@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  The analysis paralysis of having to pick an instance is definitely the biggest hurdle in my opinion. I don’t think a read-only instance is the solution though, at least not one that requires registration. That just adds another step, which I think would further confuse people. The simplest way to onboard new people is to just shove them onto the biggest instance, but I know that kind of goes against the ideology and creed of the fediverse. There were endless debates about it during the Reddit exodus of 2023.
  
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- Obelix@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Exactly this - Join-Lemmy.org has some (minor) UI and text issues. I’m also not quite happy about the sorting of the instances and the selection there. If f.e. you chose “General -> English” during onboarding, you get this screen here:
  
  Image
  
  Hexbear? Some random 11 user instance from finland? Lemmy.world nowhere to be seen? They are randomizing the instances, which kind of makes sense to prevent the bigger ones from growing even more, but which might confuse new users.
  
  But those are minor UI quirks that can be solved. All those reddit couch warriors that claim that everything should be completely redone exactly how they want it to be are insane. Normal users are able to understand the concept of instances.
  
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  - nutomic@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Lemmy.world is excluded because it represents more than 30% of all active Lemmy users, thats too much. And yes the list is somewhat randomized. Youre welcome to improve all this.
    
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- Coldcell@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Being able to just browse without signup and see largely federated content would pull in a lot of people. I am new to federated concepts, but would a generic, non-profit “home page” that’s browseable without signup is possible? Apps like Voyager could dump newbies into that until they want to post/interact?
  
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  - blackn1ght@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Yeah you can browse an instance without being logged in, so that would be possible.
    
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- rikudou@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Read only instance would put them off too. The best solution, IMO:
  
  create a pool of instances that will act as the default ones
  
  when creating an account, create it on one of the instances, redirect the user there
  
  add an option to migrate an account to a different instance in case the user wants to choose a different one after a month or so
  
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  - blackn1ght@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    By read-only, I mean they couldn’t create any communities. So essentially it would be an instance that has accounts but nothing else. Users would still be able to vote and comment on other commnities and subscribe. They could stay on it if they wanted to, but of course they wouldn’t be able to create any communities.
    
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leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
The vast majority of people want an experience where federation is invisible. Sign up and post/comment. To maintain the benefits of decentralisation and choice, that’s never going to be a truly workable thing.

The vast majority of people don’t want to create or even participate in communities, they just want to lurk, scroll and get their new content fix. Every social media based site I’ve ever been on, federated or centralised has a large group of people complaining about the lack of new content but never take it upon themselves to apply the obvious solution themselves.

These are not necessarily UX issues, these are people issues.

Maybe its time to stop continually worrying about this subject and concentrate on creating great communities? Because if we do that then users will participate organically.

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- AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  We should do both.
  
  Give people a good UX, and build solid communities.
  
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  - leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I’m not suggesting its impossible to improve the UX but I a) I think thats going to be an incredibly low priority for the developers and b) I’m not sure what changes can be made to address the essential conflict between the whole point of the fediverse - decentralisation - and a sign up process that essentially hides that without taking away an informed choice.
    
    In reality, its not really that much of a difficult concept to grasp and there are loads of resources like fedi.tips etc to help people. If the communities and content was of a sufficient quality (as oppose to quantity) people would make the fairly minimal effort to understand why the fediverse is the way it is.
    
    And if people don’t or won’t thats really their call.
    
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- Kichae@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Honestly, I think federation being (mostly) invisible is actually part of the problem. Trying to make these spaces look like something they’re not makes people believe they work in a way that they don’t. It makes “Lemmy” look like wish-dot-com Reddit, and Mastodon look like temu Twitter.
  
  This is all something new. This is a thousand Reddits, where you can see over the fence at what each other Reddit is talking about. It’s ten-thousand Twitters, where you can talk to people on other Twitters.
  
  If you could post on Facebook articles from Twitter, people would get that maybe they don’t see every single comment, or every single Facebook article all of the time. This would be understood. Twitter and Facebook look like, and are discussed as if, they’re two totally different websites. The same would be true of AVForums and CivicForums, if they could cross-post.
  
  But fediverse platforms go out of their way to hide what they are, and to strip each website of its identity. And that seems wildly fucked up to me.
  
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  - Die4Ever@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    I think federation being (mostly) invisible is actually part of the problem.
    
    But fediverse platforms go out of their way to hide what they are, and to strip each website of its identity.
    
    In what way? I don’t think Lemmy hides anything, the communities and usernames all have the @instancename.com at the end of them.
    
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- 3dmvr@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Idk I turn on the instance names on every app idk why they keep trying to hide the federation and how it works, it makes this experience unique, I dont want the same boring shit I already hated but was stuck with
  
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  - leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I do the same on mobile :) but I think once people do understand federation and why its actually a very good idea they would too - but thats not going to be true of the majority - certainly not before they use a federated service.
    
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IonicFrog@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
People forget that user experience isn’t just the stuff on the screen you interact with. There is a governance piece that is lacking in a lot of instances, and in the open source community as a whole. A lot of the successful projects out there are backed by some kind of foundation.

Take a look at the latest Hexbear drama. Some person out there owned the domain for their instance and let it expire. Now they are in a bidding war with a crypto site with a hexagon-related name. If they had formed some kind of organization or entity that registered the domain and owned the instance, this probably wouldn’t have happened. Their users wouldn’t get redirected to a domain auction site when trying to access the site. That’s not an ideal user experience. It destroys trust.

SDF being a 501©(7) is one of the reasons that it’s my home instance. For me, it provides a level of trust that an instance run by some random person on the internet doesn’t. If there is a big federation/defederation debate, then it’s really up to the membership to decide, and not a collection of admins or a single person getting the vibe of the users.

Another thing to remember is that Lemmy really shouldn’t be competing against Reddit. The purpose of Reddit is to have the user generate content in order to keep the user’s attention on the site so they can sell targeted advertisements. This is the basic business model for all of commercial social media. It has nothing to do with creating communities. That is secondary. If you want more people on Lemmy so that there is more content for you to consume, just stay on Reddit or TikTok. They need to sell ads in order to fund model training to keep your engagement up in order to sell more ads in order to provide quarterly growth to their shareholders. If you want more people on Lemmy because more brains mean better communities, then focus the communities.

The real opportunity for the fediverse is getting a lot of the existing non-profits, social organizations, and other types of communities to set up their own instances. This answers the “what instance do I join?” question by joining the instance associated with the community you’re already involved in. Another reason I’m on SDF is retro computing. If you’re really into your local makerspace, then you probably have a community ready to go for a Lemmy instance. If you’re involved in your HOA and you all have a Facebook page or are all over Nextdoor, maybe set up a Lemmy instance. In all these cases, the organizational infrastructure is there for the administrative stuff like getting a domain and paying for hosting.

Also, I’m old enough to remember that Facebook took off when everyone’s parents started joining. Imagine if the AARP rolled out a Lemmy instance. They are big enough put some serious money into development. You would probably get a lot of accessibility improvements.

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- Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Feddit.org and lemmy.ca are also non profits
  
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  - PugJesus@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    As is .world
    
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- honeynut@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Is there any way to set one up that protects the anonymity of the people involved (where even the organizers don’t know each other’s real names) for opsec purposes?
  
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  - IonicFrog@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Do what rich people do and set up shell companies. There are law firms that specialize in this kind of thing.
    
    But if that is a hard requirement is a Lemmy instance the right tool for the job? Wouldn’t something on Tor be better?
    
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FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

endless wars of who’s federeated with who

i’ve been here for months and months, i might have seen this mentioned as an aside once or twice. but “endless wars”?

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- conicalscientist@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I’m certain those replies are in bad faith to discourage people from leaving reddit. The first one is obvious for your aforemention reason. The second one. I mean the internet has been around for decades. People haven’t suddenly forgot how to use it. Even normies have been able to figure out how to click a server. They’re fomenting lazy inertia.
  
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  - FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    “retention bots” of some description wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest…
    
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- ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  The first year after the api debacle in 2023 was rife with culture class of redditors tromping through anarchist and communist communities and instances and freaking the fuck out they’re allowed to exist.
  
  Those instances have resulted in defederations or there’s been enough fatigue and migration that these days its really just down to like 3 chronically obsessed users variously spamming about it.
  
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- ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Very inside baseball opinion. It’s like me describing reddit as “endless drama” because I read every thread on subreddit drama.
  
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- knexcar@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I frequently see comments saying stuff like “don’t trust them, they’re from Lemmy.ml” or “I’m glad Hexbear defederated” usually in terms of tankies/pro-russia anti-Ukraine support. Or occasionally, a random dislike of Lemmy.world because it’s too much like Reddit (isn’t that the point?)
  
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C126@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
How did people figure out what email provider to use?

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- howrar@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Pick the one everyone else is using. Your friend has a Hotmail? You make a Hotmail. Everyone switched to Gmail? You’ll also switch to Gmail. Also for a lot of people, email is just email. They don’t even know that you can choose a different provider.
  
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- TheDorkfromYork@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I picked the wrong one when I was a kid. I barely know why I picked the instance I did. It is hard to pick one. I say when trying to join lemmy, there should be interests tags that you select and an instance is populated for you.
  
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- joelghill@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  They didn’t, they signed up for gmail.
  
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- explodicle@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  You’d get an email address from your ISP. Early on you’d just dial the ISP, send/receive email, and then automatically hang up. College freshmen were assigned a school email address.
  
  Eventually, “web mail” became popular because you could log in from any computer, like at the library.
  
  By the time email became unavoidable, everyone had already been assigned at least one email address. It was seen as a major feature of the internet itself.
  
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- velvetThunder@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Well the concept of email is much more popular than the concept of a reddit style platform or even social media entirely. So information spread more easily. And nowadays people just sign up for the account “required” by the OS of their phone which mostly comes with an email address.
  
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Snapz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Could have auto versus manual server choice. Can always maintain option for granular selection, but “normies” could walk into a quiz when migrating?

Top three things you used Reddit for? (List of maybe 10+ things, servers can maintain their feature list to empower this)

Do you like A) talking to everybody about days topics B) talking to a smaller group of like minded people

Do you like A) a MORE moderated space B) a LESS moderated space, realizing you may see more spam and controversy

And then calculates a server that meets needs, if multiple, then random number generator to assign a server. On user side, all they see is a quiz followed by a typical registration screen. This would help with distribution of users across niche servers, but feel lighter for user. They also would assume a more curated experience, regardless of where they end up. Servers could have to opt in to be fed users from search of they were afraid of impact on cost to maintain server.

The above likely aren’t the right questions, but this framework could be effective
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- lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Somebody will have to host that. Whether it’s a Lemmy app developer, or baked into the Lemmy codebase itself.
  
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  - fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Baked in would be nicer. It would kind of cool for any landing page just kind of working to get you into the threadiverse. If I keep going to nomoreuserlemmy.org (or whatever fake one you want) it just redirects on the backend for me when I log in to an instance that actually works for me.
    
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kilgore_trout@feddit.it ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Lemmy UX is identical to Reddit. Come on.

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onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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Ulvain@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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)?

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ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
The comments here are smug as fuck.

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ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Better UX than Reddit, they even point out that it’s like old.reddit instead of the trash UX they have now

It’s just dismissive to get people to agree without looking

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LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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stoly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
lol lol

Reddit sucks

I can’t be expected to make a decision

I’ll stick with reddit
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secretlyaddictedtolinux@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
New users get overwhelmed with decision fatigue, especially when they have average intelligence.

When selecting a federation, new users should be told:

“Because Lemmy isn’t run by a large corporation, lots of small volunteers run Lemmy and run different copies of Lemmy at the same time. These different copies are called instances. You can choose 1 or just click the large red button and we’ll randomly select one of the most popular instances for you. If you aren’t sure what to choose, just press the button!”

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daggermoon@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
We could stop bullying .ml users for being .ml users. That’s the only “war” I have seen here.

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obsolete@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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JasSmith@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
IMHO, the UX is bad, but the user base is also repellant. It’s further left than Reddit so most people who jump in bounce right off. That’s going to be difficult to change organically. Especially because most users respond to this with “good.” So there’s definitely no appetite to appeal to a wider audience. I predict Lemmy will become increasingly ideologically partisan and isolated.

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ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
“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”

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SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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

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Smokeydope@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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CafecitoHippo@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

Baltimore Orioles – There’s one on lemmy.world with 150 subscribers. The last post is from 4 months ago and it’s a game thread posted by a bot with 0 comments. There’s also one on fanaticus.social with the last post from 7 months ago.

Carolina Panthers – There’s one on fanaticus.social with 3 subscribers.

Miami Heat – There’s one on lemmy.world with 10 subscribers.

Pittsburgh Penguins – Again, lemmy.world with 11 subscribers.

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.
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underwire212@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.
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Kevnyon@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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