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?
We could stop bullying .ml users for being .ml users. That’s the only “war” I have seen here.
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.
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.
While I understand and largely agree with your point, I think it’s worthwhile to question whether it’s reasonable that this is the way people expect the Internet to work.
Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack, so that unless you’re somewhat tech-savvy, you can’t tell the concept of app apart from the concept of server. Not unlike how Android and iOS have been obscuring many basics of the system to the point that some people don’t even know what a filesystem is.
Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved, rather than just “the way things work” and that we need to cather to it. Mostly because FOSS services will always, invariably, struggle to adapt to a conception of the internet optimized for consumption and nothing else.
I agree that people nowadays might struggle to understand what, for instance, a third-party app is, but I also think it’s too an unreasonably low bar to just let it be, and have FOSS forever playing acrobatics to somehow adapt to it.
Whether Lemmy should be the one leading this struggle is a whole another argument lol. Somehow forcing people to understand this with Lemmy in particular, without changing anything of the larger culture, will just cause people to not use Lemmy outright.
But this cannot be the way it works. Everyone using the internet needs some bare minimum tech literacy.
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?
Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
Not necessarily, but we don’t want a accidental filter that filters out non tech savvy people. We want all kinds of people on Lemmy
I’m working on a lemmy app. Will be UI focused!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe lemmy.myserv.one is what you’re looking for.
Interesting, thanks!
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.
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.
Good, Lemmy doesn’t need morons like these
Lemmy desperately needs to get rid of toxicity of this kind.
It has become a more hostile place, and this negatively affects the experience for everyone, including the OGs.
And yes, if you want to have more lively conversations, you need more people. If you need more people, you should stop calling them morons and help them figure it out in baby steps. Don’t make it harder than it already is.
I don’t want to have conversations with children.
Then I guess make sure you don’t talk to yourself.
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.
I disagree. I just found a link to lemmy.world, with no idea of how lemmy worked, and I’m perfectly happy. To me it seems like people’s endless complaints about servers come down to personal issues.
It’s like politics, hahaha. Those who don’t trouble themselves with too many details remain content with whatever they their emotions dictated while those who do research, sort out real facts, read reviews, understand the platform details live the next four years in constant anxiety
It’s actually a good point. To scale up we need to reach beyond nerds , find a populist voice
Maybe this is a terrible thing to say, but I actually like that registering for federated sites requires a bit work.
IMO, the internet was more enjoyable when it was just full of us nerds 😅
That does come with the unavoidable side effect that the majority of the people will simply not participate. It then follows that sites like Reddit will continue to be the place where the majority of the people will go.
If your goal is to participate in small communities and you are okay with the slow pace of those communities, then that’s fine. If your goal is to move people away from corporate-sponsored media for whatever reason, then this won’t work.
When it comes to software things, I do tend to err on the side of supporting new users - I’ll be the first to argue that a person should not have to learn how to use the terminal in order to use Linux.
That said, this situation is honestly bewildering to me. I cannot fathom how the idea of having choices could be considered, let alone by so many people to even make this into a controversy, to be bad design. That’s the very thing that makes federation great.
You’re all seriously overthinking this. Just look at a few of the most populated sites, and pick one that looks good. The choice makes 95% no difference in practice because on most instances you’re going to see all the same content as soon as you press the All button anyway.
One thing I can imagine that would make the experience better, is maybe if there was a one-click way to join or migrate to another lemmy instance, using an existing login. Personally I don’t think it’s a big deal to just quickly sign up for a new instance if I want to. But I did see that Pixelfed has the option of signing on by using a Mastodon account. So maybe something like that can help?
“I cannot fathom how the idea of having choices could be considered, let alone by so many people to even make this into a controversy, to be bad design. That’s the very thing that makes federation great.”
Because for every choice presented, people want to know the consequences of each one before proceeding. It’s a well understood problem in sales and marketing. People do not want to put themselves in a position where they have to undo. Companies like Apple do this very well. In computer shops, the reason staff are hired is to help get the customer from “wanting a laptop” to “choosing one laptop”, rather than walk away feeling that they need to think about it more.
“Just look at a few of the most populated sites, and pick one that looks good. The choice makes 95% no difference in practice”.
Maybe if they said that on the signup page it would help. I think it would have helped me. But just because you have a sense of what “looks good” doesn’t mean the average person does. It’s the average person that I want to interact with on the internet.
When I recommend federated sites to people, I literally just pick the ones I’m already on and send the link. Problem solved. They can learn more and try new things in their own time. It’s also not hard to just tell them, “It’s like email, but for the whole internet.”
“Of Earth’s estimated 400,000 plant species, we could eat some 300,000, armed with the right imagination, boldness and preparation. Yet humans, possibly the supreme generalist, eat a mere 200 species globally, and half our plant-sourced protein and calories come from just three: maize, rice and wheat.”
Would you consider biodiversity to also be bad ux? Maybe consider that the benefits of decentralization far outweigh the cons of your marketing programming, and that the issue is more one of education. Dumbing down and patronizing people like we need somebody to make our choices for us sounds like a solution that’s worse than the problem.
Biodiversity is great. Abandoning confused users isn’t. Those options can still exist without baffling the user.
“Marketing programming” understands the human condition and tries to facilitate people. That part - for all its other failings - is more empathetic than telling people who struggle that we refuse to “dumb down” the process for them.
It’s not empathetic. It just tries to understand human psychology well enough to manipulate consumer choices for more profits. If you want something on that philosophy, that’s what reddit is already for.
I’m not trying to say that marketing is empathetic. I’m saying that meeting people where they are at is.
Where they are is having spent most of their life in a walled garden corporate internet. What you need to understand is that all new things have a learning curve, and the process of learning needs to be accepted - rather than trying to pressure free systems into being the very thing everyone is wanting to get away from.
Freedom means having choice. Sometimes a lot of it. Sometimes that’s scary. But it’s worth embracing.
If any of that were true there wouldn’t be posts and comments here and elsewhere from professional programmers who gave up on the registration process because of bad UX. I was one of them. People don’t give up on registering here because it’s “scary”.
If you’re one of the many people here happy for this to remain a niche for tech people then that’s different.
Lemmy is too right wing to serve as a good Reddit replacement. The queer communities on Reddit don’t want to move here because their members will be harassed.
Political literacy classes are available online… the idea of anybody thinking Lemmy is right wing (whether it’s code or the majority of its user base) is hilarious and a bit sad at the same time.
Spacetime is relative. If we’re putting directions on politics, then politics has to be relative too.
Well, right is a term relative to centre which is relative to left.
No it’s not. It can be relative to anywhere. If drag’s on the left side of a room, then the center of the room is to the right.
-7 and -9 are both numbers… but none of them are at zero or above. They are both negative, just by varying degrees.
Are you referring to yourself as “drag” or is that a typo?
Directions do not have an absolute reference point. There is no center of the universe. Numbers do. That’s why numbers aren’t like directions. Don’t use numbers as an example when numbers have something directions don’t.
I was trying to be analogous to help you understand… either you don’t want to understand or you’re not willing to understand or… there’s something else going on here.
