The second this hurdle is crossed we'll need a new Lemmy

I tried to join Lemmy during the API debacle, but then it asked me to choose a server. It didn't explain what that meant or how it would affect me. I could read a long, confusing explanation of it elsewhere, but that illuminated nothing. So I gave up.

Eventually I tried again and just chose lemmy.world, since it was the largest. After that it was smooth sailing, and I like Lemmy a lot more than reddit. It turns out it didn't even really matter which server I chose. (Although now I see some comments from people saying there's something wrong with lemmy.world.)

You just need to hold the new user's hand a little. Anyone who has ever designed a UI for an office environment would know immediately that the server question is going to be an impenetrable wall for many users.

I sincerely hope there's less content here than Reddit, forever. I hope the UI keeps the masses out, and the technically savy are the only ones here.

I want to doomscroll less, I want to be astroturfed less. I want to interact with more humans and fewer bots, even when that means I interact less. I want fewer AI prompts, AI Art and corpo spam ads masquerading as engagement. I want less video and more text. Overall, I want to be spending less time on the internet, on my phone, and I don't want to hear about every last toxic thing Trump did to drive me crazy. Lemmy helps me control that feed better, so I deleted my reddit account and I hope to stay here until I manage to stop opening social media at all.

Lemmy right now feels like the internet before the long september. I hope it never changes.

Good UI (in my android app) is the reason I came to Lemmy.

I disagree that this is a concern. If you are already exaggerating about federation wars, chances are you already tried lemmy and know a good bit about selecting instances. The average user will not care as much as you do.

The average user will go to join-lemmy site, will not care at all about the different instances and likely choose the biggest one or first one they see. None of them will think "oh no this one is involved in federation wars" because thats not something you find out before knowing some about the fediverse.

I think Lemmy needs a higher-level sign-up procedure that hides the complexity of the fediverse. This could be a webpage with a simple, clutter-free interface that handles picking and registering on an instance from a curated list semi-automatically, for example, by asking you 3-4 questions before giving you a suggested server that fits your responses (which you can change) and a button to register there. The procedure could also handle the occasional additional sign-up requirements that some instances have.

IMHO, 90% of users will never interact with the "federation" aspects of Lemmy after that, and they also don't need to. I personally don't feel like Lemmy being federated has much of an impact on my user experience day to day.

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.

Fully agree with that, the bar is too to high usually unless you're being handheld through the process, realistically there should be an app like how blue sky is that doesn't give you any of the options because less options means easier setup. If they want to jump instances after that that would be considered an advanced function but they can choose to do so on their own accord.

Another issue I think is lack of actual awareness, like Bsky got media coverage, the everyday person still is like "the hells a lemmy"

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.

Whether these are just lazy excuses or not, but let's be real for a moment.

Imagine someone, who's used to go to reddit.com, search for a reddit app in the app store, both of which have the same logo, design, etc... and use their username/password to login and browse the content.

almost every service, that people use for the last decades is based on this specific approach, except for emails. Even the TLD was always .com

Now imagine, how overwhelmed those people might feel, when you tell them "just come over to lemmy".

Lemmy, where? lemmy.com? Here's where you then start explaining the different instances, federation, etc..

the next question will be: where's the Lemmy app? Remember, the unified logo and design? well, good luck explaining that all lemmy apps are de facto third-party-apps.

Now, once they make it throug all of that, the next hurdle that will confuse the hell out of them are the communities scattered all across the instances.

Ah Lemmy. Still full of comments from smug assholes pretending their lack of sonder is the good kind, and if they don't understand something it's cause it's worthless and pointless while their knowledge is the most important.

Yeah, there are other reasons than the UX/UI and the screenshot even shows it.

"feels like old reddit" is a weird way to say "it feels like new reddit, but doesn't leak ram, doesn't take as much or more processing power as AI does to run, and interjects ads randomly into the feeds"

What can we do?

File issues on the GitHub for how to improve the UX, and put thumbs up reactions on issues so the devs know which issues to prioritize

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues

Or even better, make pull requests if you're a dev

I'm not getting what the UX problems are, and if you change things aren't there just going to be new problems with the changes? I think the default experience is a lot better than Reddit at least.

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.

So yeah, in my experience it's bad UX design, it felt like gatekeeping tbh.

I use Boost for Lemmy. The transition from Reddit was easy for me, and I know little about the fediverse other than the most basic outlines.