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?
Reddit ux is also ass. Only difference between reddit and lemmy is that the federation bit is extremely confusing and not intuitive.
What's most annoying is that for 95% of users, federation doesn't even matter. You just log on and use lemmy exactly like reddit. All feds are consolidated onto my front page anyway.
People make a big deal about it, it definitely intimidated me when I first logged up. It's one of the reasons I put off getting into lemmy for such a long time, and it's frustrating that in the end, it really makes no difference.
https://old.lemmy.world/ looks just like reddit. It's not the UI. It's network effect and there's not a lot to be done.
UX means "user experience". It is distinct from the UI. OP is basically saying the process of signing up to federated social media is too complicated for the average user, not because of the way it looks and how you interact with it (the UI) but because of it's not as easy to understand the concepts behind how Lemmy works.
I was on Sync for Reddit before going here, and checked out Lemmy as the devs switched platform. So the joke's on them, my UX is basically identical.
That said, sucks that people shy away because of complexity.
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?
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.
I think a big problem is a lot of the explainers for new users, at least the ones that were around back when I first joined Mastodon, were or are absolute dog shit. They were all existential explanations rather than practical ones. I was trying to figure out which instance to join, and why one might be better for me than another, and every explainer I saw was basically a variation on, "iT's JuSt LikE EmAiL. wHy Is tHaT hArD? sToP bEiNg So sTuPid, DuMmY." None of them really explained the user experience, and how different instances might affect it, let alone the existence of the local and global feeds and how your instance choice affects those. It was like asking someone how to use chopsticks and them telling you, "It's easy. Just put food in your mouth with them. Works just like a fork."
Technically true, but it omits some pretty crucial information.
Once you're into it and have the lay of the land, it seems really simple in retrospect. But if you're coming in cold with no idea how any of it works, and the only help you get is some dickhead shouting, "EmAiL! iT's LiKe EmAiL!" then the learning curve seems a lot steeper than it actually is.
99% of users are going to check out when you ask which server they want to join
Do you really want mass appeal right now? Just be patient, build good information and ppl will come
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.
I’m fine with the effort bar being selecting an instance. If someone can’t get beyond that, there’s probably not much they have to say I’d be interested in.
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:
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.
On the discovery front, a potential idea would be to allow communities to have a specific category tags field. When a user signs up, the host instance could have a page that they're directed to (this would be controlled by the instance, so they wouldn't have to have it enabled) which lets the users pick some topics they're interested in and can then subscribe to the communities right away.
Just 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.
Reading these comments I feel a sense of dread. You are all experiencing survivor bias. Initially when I ran into barriers I gave up for like a year before bothering to try Lemmy again.
If you don't want Lemmy to serve as an actual counter to corporate controlled social media if it means letting in "normies" then you are content with corporate controlled social media continuing to dominate our lives. Which sounds about right for humanity. The smugness is vile.
Just bring on the vacuum decay event already.
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)?
Bad UX isn't keeping most people away from Lemmy. Not being able to give up their addiction to Reddit is what's keeping them from Lemmy. There's a lot of people who will complain about the shitty things billionaires and tech companies and politicians do to them, but aren't willing to lift a finger to change things.
You're never going to bring those people to Lemmy unless Reddit shuts down and you develop an algorithm to spoon feed them whatever they want to feed their doomscrolling habit. Lemmy is better off without them.
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.
Could have auto versus manual server choice. Can always maintain option for granular selection for those who want, 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 from the filtered options. 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
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 501c(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.
P.S.
Check out how theATL.social is organized. The guy did as a LLC, but he seems to be community focused and transparent.
https://yall.theatl.social/post/201135
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!"
The comments here are smug as fuck.
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"?
lol lol
"Here's Lemmy. It's like Reddit. There's a bunch of different websites for it, but they all have basically the same people and posts on them. Just join one near you, if you don't like it you can always use a different one later"
It should have an account creation process like those old RPGs where it asks a series of questions then says, “we recommend this server: . It is ” 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? Would you prefer a large server? etc
It should also be possible to skip the quiz and go straight to server selection at any point.
but it feels like old reddit
Yes, and that's a good thing.
There are lots of Lemmy apps that display posts in different ways. If you want "bells and whistles", then find an app that gives you that.
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.
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.
I assumed (probably incorrectly) that users would be visiting Lemmy via apps, so the UX would depend on which app they used.
I don't know. I have a soft spot for Lemmy. The interactions here seem more genuine less about updoots.
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
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
