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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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.
"Lemmy has 47k monthly active users
Feel free if you have any questions"
Pinned post on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I think, you didn't get my point.
Everything you mentioned, is nice and all, but who cares where the server is located? if they federate with each other, it doesn't matter. Again, I'm just talking from a novices POV and things thst might confuse them. They surely confused me at the very beginning
In the EU there is some amount of data protection and privacy rights, so that matters to quite a few people. Commercial outfits handle those distinctions behind the scenes (eg, US users vs EU users get different amounts of privacy). On the fediverse, the user has to figure this out themselves.
Beyond that, I agree with everything you say. Some of the instances don't even have the name "Lemmy" in the domain or brand which makes it confusing. Or maybe they're not Lemmy but just ActivityPub compatible. I have no idea. You can also get unlucky picking a "bad" server. I first joined Kbin.social because it had the best UI at the time but man, it rarely worked and totally put me off.
