Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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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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've used Voyager before and while it comes close, unless they changed how the app operates, I don't think that app fits the description that I'm asking for.
The entire issue with Lemmy is the Federation aspect of it, while it's a good thing to have it's way too confusing for the everyday person. For example I use eternity, the only layout that remotely looks decent in my opinion. It worked similar to Voyager where when you open it for the first time it brought you to an instance and then when you went to make an account it asked you which instance you wanted to make the account on. That right there is going to turn away a good 30 to 40% of the people looking. I know it almost turned me away.
For the point of responding to this comment I reinstalled Voyager, I'm going to portray my experience from someone who doesn't have experience with the fediverse. If you don't wish to see the narration, you can skip the spoiler
Okay cool I see a bunch of posts, I expect this lem.ee thing is the program oh fun they have Politics on the front page I thought I was trying to avoid that but okay there are some memes here that are pretty cool, let me try to like one,
oh I need an account yeah that makes sense, neat they have a learn more button(most people likely won't click this btw) okay an entire page explaining that the programs like an email client, how is up voting content like receiving emails 😕(personally think they should have used subscribe/follow for that imo)
Okay cool I think I get it let me just use the default instance, let me just skip past all of this pointless TOS stuff, "please write I accept acknowledging that you've read the rules in the sidebar on the front page." uhh Sidebar? Well I don't know how to get to that so let me try the next instance, lemmy.world sounds good. and that one is a 1 2 3 process(if email verification works)
From here they have a functioning account but the app has failed to tell them the core aspects of what federation is, they've failed to explain what defederation is, they failed to explain what the repercussions of choosing an instance does, it's only explained that Lemmy is like email, and to the everyday user, email is identical across all providers, users very rarely if at all have an email provider actively block an email server because they don't agree with what's going on there. For example in the case of LW by choosing that platform you're actively removing yourself from anything that's against their mentalities such as the piracy community, you're also subjecting yourself to a somewhat heavy moderation style instance and also subjecting yourself to hatred in the community without actually realizing you're doing so. You won't know this tell you get told by a user (and you WILL get told by a user).
This could be avoided by having a integration with fediseer or being able to integrate with the instances Blacklist so you can see what is blocked. Or even just a link to their rules would be amazing.
That's my main annoyance in current mobile apps, they are only decent for established fediversers. Most people would have left second or third message into my experience and just gone back to other platforms
