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 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?
Why is “drama” on Lemmy always highly exaggerated by people?
“Endless wars of who federates with who”. What is that person even talking about and who the fuck would even care as a normal user?
Been using Lemmy for a couple of years, not seen this once.
Also, the ux is pretty much the same as Reddit.
These people are just stakeholders in Reddit. They are afraid of change, or losing any rep they have. They sit on a pile of useless upvotes.
I think a lot of people that think the UX is different from reddit weren’t on reddit 14 years ago when it did look very similar to this.
The UX once you figure out what works for you in Lemmy is nice, the UX getting to that point is terrible, as many have said. Most will quit before getting to the good part.
Really? You never ran into the endless “…furthermore, .ml must be defederated” posts?
Also, the ux is pretty much the same as Reddit.
The default one is a bit minimal, but we have many Alternative UIs are as modern looking as new Reddit.
They also work much better while being modern looking. There’s a reason so many of us came over here when they got rid of third party apps, the new Reddit interface is… bad.
Really early on like right after the API fuckfest, there was a large influx of users who picked servers based on whatever. As a result, servers defederated and there was a lot of drama as a result.
Though that said I haven’t heard much about defederating in some time.
When half the posts in your feed are “X instance bad” people get just tired and go out.
It has happened to me sometimes a meaningful part of my feed was just people brigading about some instance they don’t like. It’s ridiculous.
There are a few .world posters who make two to three posts a day about how much they hate lemmygrad hexbear and .ml.
The people who aren’t here are making excuses to not be here. Otherwise they’d be here.
That being said the feud between world and ml users is pretty noticeable
I’ve seen it a few times but it’s really easy to avoid tbh
Not necessailly federation, but I’ve seen a lot of people prejudge commenters for what instance they’re a part of, most commonly calling people from .ml or hexbear tankies just for being on .ml or hexbear. It gets old really quickly.
I haven’t heard about any of that drama since the early days when things were still getting sorted out
From everyone looking in: what the fuck is, ok, was Hexbear, why should I care and wtf can’t I read anything from that place.
Same with registration, instances, etc. It’s explained nowhere where how and why and i never have found a complete index with instances and communities.
I only can use lemmy because of sync. Yes, I’m also a reddit refugee.
When you read that stuff on reddit there’s a parameter you need to keep in mind : these people are not really discussing Lemmy. They’re rationalizing and justifying why they are not on Lemmy. Totally different conversation.
Nobody wants to come out and say “I know mainstream platforms are shit and destroying the fabric of reality but I can’t bring myself to be on a platform except it is the Hip Place to Be”. So they’ll invent stuff that paints them in a good light.
You’ll still see people claiming that Mastodon is unusable because you have to select an instance - even though you don’t have to, you can just type Mastodon on Google, click the first link, and create an account in 2 clicks. It’s been ages. But the people still using Twitter need the excuse because otherwise what does it make them?
Oh yeah, I don’t even know which one I signed up to without looking.
Been here a while now and I really like it. Doesn’t hurt that I’m a lefty that loves star trek, though.
It can be quiet at times and I don’t really have much to share, myself - but that’s not a bad thing to me. Easier to set it down sometimes.
It seems like Lemmy should offer really easy research data for people to back these claims up. Like just counting “Lemmy sucks” vs “Lemmy is awesome”
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it feels like old reddit
Wait, when did that become a bad thing? I exclusively browsed old.reddit.com because the new layout is a fucking abomination.
That’s the feature! Not a bug.
The new reddit design sucks and always has, other than dark mode.
When I first read it I thought they were mentioning that as a selling point! But yeah it seems like they’re saying it like it’s a bad thing.
How old are you?
Boost feels a lot like rif which I was using and which shutdown made me switch to lemmy.
Yeah, it seems most people still on reddit prefer the newer mobile UI. I never used one of the ‘fancy’ modern reddit apps, and I’m lowkey scared for the inevitable switch I’ll have to make when Eternity finally dies. All the other FOSS apps left have a very ‘iOS’ feel to them that I can’t stand
I liked it a few years ago but they made it worse every update til it became near unusable, I used the spot where the put answers to hold a community so I can browse multiple at once like tabs
Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it ‘wars’.
As for UX, there’s definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstance without explicitly subbing to them all or using lemmyverse.net.
But I don’t think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.
If that was a legitimate issue, MMO’s (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn’t have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.
Even if Lemmy was one big simple centralized server, that user would just come up with another reason they couldn’t switch.
“Oh, it’s too small, my niche communities aren’t there”
“The UI isn’t as nice”
“The mod tools aren’t as good”
Etc.
The only real federation dramas I can think of were relating to Hexbear and Beehaw. If Greenleaf was on one of those instances then maybe it could explain their skewed perspective. Otherwise yeah, I don’t get it.
Preemptively defederating from Threads was widely discussed in a lot of places.
That’s fair I guess. I remember that. That was around the same time as well, so someone registered to say Beehaw or Hexbear during the Threads fediverse announcement period would probably get the idea that federation wars is all that’s going, at least if they stopped visiting Lemmy shortly thereafter.
If that was a legitimate issue, MMO’s (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn’t have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.
But in an MMO, you still get the same content no matter what server you choose. Over here, it directly impacts what content you can interact with based on (de)federation.
If you joined a German-speaking WoW server as a non-speaking German, the experience was going to be subpar
Yes, and if you join a German-speaking instance as a non-German speaking user, the experience will also be subpar. Hence I talked about content, not language.
I just remembered that WoW nowadays offers a lot of different experiences: Classic, Seasons of Mastery, Retail, etc.
And people get different experiences based on the server they pick.
I’m on three different instances and the sort by All-hot feed is nearly identical.
I’m not on Beehaw or Hexbear, but those instances make it pretty well known they block a lot of other instances.
Some instances have very different rules on them that would affect your experience. Like not allowing downvotes, for example. Blahaj users can’t see downvotes or downvote anything themselves.
Yeah, true. But that’s cool. Having choice like that is great!
But I suppose that’s the issue. Trying to keep signup simple to help drive user engagement. How much do you try to wrap someone’s head around such nuanced differences, and when do you say “just join me on my instance”?
eh, back when the “exodus” was happening it felt like every second post is about defederation. Nowadays you don’t hear much about it anymore, but if you only looked back then I see how you could come to that conclusion.
I specifically remember looking up tables of who defederates from who and what instances allow NSFW or downvoting because this was an issue among some of the top instances back then.
I ended up making 4 different accounts over 2 months until I landed on a server I’m happy with. That will never be acceptable to any normal user.
Every time someone brings up these issues, people here downplay them like you are doing it right now and nothing is ever done about it.
This, the survivor bias is absurdly high around lemmy.
This is my fourth instance because, for some reason, it’s extremely hard to find an instance that defeds the 3 main propaganda instances, allows porn/hentai, piracy talk, weed and isn’t too pissy about downvotes.Still I am thinking about leaving lemmy due to a complete lack of content for my country other than government propaganda… And I don’t feel comfortable creating a community for the same reason and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else from my country so… Nobody who cared about it (or who could help me mod).
I like how you put that. We really are the ones who survived😂
defeds the 3 main propaganda instances, allows porn/hentai, piracy talk, weed and isn’t too pissy about downvotes.
You indeed made the good choice, Lemmy.cafe is the one
Still I am thinking about leaving lemmy due to a complete lack of content for my country other than government propaganda…
Why not use both Lemmy and another platform?
You indeed made the good choice, Lemmy.cafe is the one
Yeah, it only took me 4 tries and I still am ready to jump ship if needed.
Why not use both Lemmy and another platform?
Already am, but at least on Reddit the mods can pretend to ban/control the propaganda accounts, but over here they are the only ones posting content (for my country) and that’s tiring… the rest of the content is the same here and Reddit, so I feel more inclined to stay on Reddit since I don’t really post anything anyway (I don’t even comment over there anymore) and Lemmy feels like something I rather delete more and more… been thinking about PieFed, but the same problem as everything Fediverse, I have to pick a goddamn instance and I don’t have energy for that for now.
I looked this up when joining a month ago because I saw hella posts on it and joining world to not see the piracy community didnt help
Honestly, joining a community just for the type of content they have or what they filter is useless. Best approach for me is to have access to everything and then filter what you don’t like by yourself.
Ah yes, because telling people the reason they don’t join your platform is invalid is sure to make them change their minds. 🙄
0 marketing sense. People like you are why the Reddit userbase mostly steers clear.
Was going to post this. They’re just burying their heads in the sand.
Lemmy’s onboarding is trash and so is the main UI. Get away from that and it’s actually great. BUT, most people used the Reddit app when Reddit still allowed 3rd party apps and access so you HAVE to appeal to the masses, no matter how dumb you think they are. Don’t complain about not having mass appeal if you don’t want mass appeal or listen to them and make the change they’re asking for.
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
“but it feels like old reddit”. My god, imagine actively preferring the new reddit UI. Let them keep their shiny jangling keys instead of coming over here and pestering the devs for a snoovatar feature or whatever nonsense.
The ‘maybe read for 2 minutes to figure it out’ miniscule barrier to entry is a feature not a bug.
Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
Joining is a bad experience. “Please commit now to a server on this service you know nothing about… Then you can try it out!” I understand the concept of decentralization, but it’s ass-backwards…
I don’t get how people get hung on choosing a server when people have been chosing a starter Pokémon since 1998 without any major issues. And you get just about the “same” amount of practical info.
Really, what tiktok does to a generation…
because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
No, it isn’t.
The UX is fine. It’s clean, fast, and functional. Anyone who is too fancy for “old Reddit” can stay on new Reddit with the bots and Xers. They’d just come over and be nothing but insufferable anyway.
o.oMultiple front ends and themes are available. In the end, we’re here for the conversation, not fancy graphics, sounds, or CSS trash.
If someone can’t get past picking a server or simple graphics, the likelyhood of them being any benefit here is minimal. The more is not always the merrier.
Unless we fix the UX problems in Lemmy, a Bluesky-like alternative of reddit is going to pop up, and overtake Lemmy, like what happened with Mastadon
Agreed. But as long as people don’t actively leave Lemmy in favor of the new service I’d be okay with it I guess. I mean it would still be cool if Lemmy grew larger but hey, we got a nice little community here
Text-based forums are a niche. The vast majority of the population doesn’t like that format. There’s a reason no Bluesky has emerged, the appeal is just not there.
About Bluesky, there was an app that allowed “Reddit view” (so threads with votes). Can’t find it back right now, the search mostly show Flashes, the Instagram alternative, which probably reflects the larger interest for that type of format.
The web ui has this option now. Although you can’t collapse threads so it’s still pretty hard to navigate
If anything the success or the Twitter ui shows you don’t always need a good UX to succeed
Serious question here: what is the bad ux experience of lemmy compared to reddit? (except choosing an instance in the beginning, I get that this might turn off a lot of people)
It’s a solved problem. Check out phtn.app and vger.app also Alexandrite, Next and Tesseract. Like the problem is solved 5 times over.
Unless we use one of those as the default UI, the problem isn’t solved, people will give up before knowing of their existence.
Tell it to the hosts.
You can literally just share phtn.app and say its how you use the threadiverse/lemmy, it doesnt need to be hosted on a site with the same lemmy instance you can login to any account through these frontends
Alexandrite is honestly great. Made the experience much better. Just wish I could have it open links in a separate tab.
Easy fix, if it isnt federated I give them a one star and talk about how im tired of ads and corporate influence in my discussion forums so id rather use the threadiverse, prob does nothing but if it gets even one person to google and switch it was worth the 5 seconds it took to type
I did this for a couples posts that popped up on redditalrs that werent lemmy, they were definitelty alread netuered and ready for ads, worse than reddit
For the majority of commenters: UX is not UI.
The poor UX experience is the research a person has to do before they can even participate. You need to have a basic understanding of how the network works, and then you have to shop around for a server.
It’s enough friction to prevent people from on-boarding and that’s not good for a platform that needs people to be valuable.
Wait wait wait… This implies people like new reddit… That shit makes my eyes bleed wtf
Aren’t you guys sick of forced infinite growth in every aspect of our collective existence? The Fediverse is not shareholder owned, we don’t have to be slaves to The Red Line That Must Go Up. Reddit went to shit when it was aggresively mainstreamed, I don’t want it to happen to lemmy as well.
- Stop making blanket claims about instances you like or dislike, no matter how fair you feel they may be, and don’t fall for the bait of others doing it. This is just drama and is exhausting to read about.
- Instead of suggesting people “join Lemmy”, say things like “Join Lemmy at programming.dev” (or whatever instance you yourself are using). Sure, “but picking a server is hard” will always probably be a complaint, but leading with the one you personally use is the best way around it. If you’re on a hobby focused instance (like I am) then maybe suggest a generic instance to people outside of your hobby. Don’t be afraid to suggest lemmy.world. It’s better to suggest the biggest instance than endlessly debate about which one is the best to suggest.
