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?
I totally disagree.
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.
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.
Yep. I came, couldn't get into it, https://lemmy.world/post/1388830 and unfortunately went back to Reddit.
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"
To the guy in here going "UX != UI!!!" Sure, but you can't design UX, especially for the unwashed masses. "Tried cutting toenails with lawnmower; severed foot. 0/10 bad user experience."
Lemmy has a "have our cake and eat it too" problem. It offers two mutually exclusive promises:
In practice, the former is more or less true, the latter really isn't.
First there's the obvious topic of defederation, which makes the "join one server, access all of them" an outright lie. On the one hand, I think everyone here will agree this platform requires defederation to function so that we can kick out instances like lolli.rape or whatever, which thank you admins and mods for dealing with. But what about Hexbear, or Truth Social (which as I understand it is running on Mastodon software). The only honest answer to "where do we draw that line?" is "somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there."
It is intellectually dishonest to say that Lemmy has this problem and Reddit doesn't. Post in r/mensrights and an automod bans you from r/twoxchromosomes. Do basically anything anywhere on the platform and get banned from r/conservative. They managed to implement "It's a different platform depending on who you are" on a monolithic service.
All that crap aside, the average user has a more limited perspective on the rest of the fediverse than his home instance. Often, the UI defaults to viewing only local posts, you have to tell it to give you a global feed. You can browse a list of your local communities, you can browse a list of global communities, you can't browse a list of communities on a given foreign instance. 'Show me everything on lemmy.sports' or indeed 'show me a list of communities on lemmy.nsfw.' You cannot create (or moderate?) communities on instances you aren't a member of. It is, if only slightly, easier to participate on your home instance than elsewhere.
Either your choice of server does matter, or it doesn't.
If it does matter, we shouldn't have so many general purpose instances, it should be lemmy.music and lemmy.art and lemmy.uk. Then newcomers are presented a meaningful choice. Are you mostly interested in discussions pertaining to your country? Your hobby? Your career? Sign up here to mostly participate in that, and no matter which you pick you can visit the rest of the Lemmyverse, too."
If it doesn't matter, then design it such that instances are entirely transparent to users; eliminate the possibility of !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@lemmy.ml coexisting, and make all instances lemmy1.world lemmy2.world, issue credentials centrally and then just spread the load in the background.
I don't think you can have both at the same time.
I don't think it's UI issue. I think it's a traffic issue.
People go to a social media site because it's where everyone else is.
But the nature of the federation is that you end up with silos of traffic, and those silos are too small to keep content flowing, which stifles community engagement and subsequently growth. For every 10 people that see a post, one will like it enough to vote on it. Out of those people, 1 in 10 will be engaged enough to actually post. If they post and get no response, they lose interest in re-posting.
The strength of Reddit was that it allowed everyone to talk about everything at once, and it became the de-facto hub of the internet for many folks. You go onto /r/all and you'd get the sense that the world is there, flowing past. You don't really get that on lemmy or mastodon servers unless you make an active effort to go and subscribe to things.
A solution to this is, actually, more federation. Many lemmy instances could band together by building a front page interface that combined all of the best posts across servers. This would improve the speed and flow of content dramatically. Think of it as alliance like the old web-rings of the early days of the internet, but in this situation, you're posting the content of all your allied federated servers, and they're posting yours. Thus, when someone goes to lemmy.world, they really see the whole world of lemmy, not just this one instance.
This would draw in new users more than any interface update, IMHO. It also would serve as a great place for them to start to discover what they want to subscribe to and participate in, providing a far wider choice than any one instance on its own can provide.
And they don't have to join. I really don't mean this in a dismissive way and respect their opinion. But why all this worrying about the need to have the fediverse dominate all social media? Maybe it's meant to be this way: your vibe decides your tribe. My vibe isn't commercial, toxic political talk, or influencers, thus my tribe is the fediverse instead of IG or Tiktok.
Lots of Lemmy clients have great UI. The default web interface looks fine as well.
Wait till they try out Matrix. No client works properly and all the mobile clients are really bad.
Well, when I started to use lemmy I had a few problems:
I do think lemmy is worthwhile and can be fun, but as a reddit alternative it has already failed. You cannot purge insanity by splitting it up into smaller insanlets. That's just schizophrenia.
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.
Bad UX isn't keeping most people away from Lemmy. Not being able to give up their addiction to Reddit is what's keeping them from Lemmy. There's a lot of people who will complain about the shitty things billionaires and tech companies and politicians do to them, but aren't willing to lift a finger to change things.
You're never going to bring those people to Lemmy unless Reddit shuts down and you develop an algorithm to spoon feed them whatever they want to feed their doomscrolling habit. Lemmy is better off without them.
"bad ux? bad ui?" i am a graphic designer!!! i only use linux and open source software like inkscape!! yea let's go!! fediverse
The problem is content, there isn't any. Either I select all -> hot and see new content that almost feels like /r/subreddit_name/new or I select all -> active and while those have engagement, its all very old content, like a day old, two days old, etc. And then the other problem is that I only see two types of content usually: Either articles or screenshots from social media. Nothing else.
I just think that unless there's a sudden influx of users for whatever reason, lemmy will never pick up. We just need more and more people, but have no way of getting them, not to mention so many communities just choosing not to migrate off Reddit, especially huge sports communities.
It should have an account creation process like those old RPGs where it asks a series of questions then says, “we recommend this server:
<blah>
. It is<one short sentence about its content>
” then has click next to proceed or click “I want to choose another server” to just get a list.1-hate, 5-love Do you like capitalism? Do you like tech? Do you like sports? Would you prefer a large server? etc
It should also be possible to skip the quiz and go straight to server selection at any point.
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 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.
Reading these comments I feel a sense of dread. You are all experiencing survivor bias. Initially when I ran into barriers I gave up for like a year before bothering to try Lemmy again.
If you don't want Lemmy to serve as an actual counter to corporate controlled social media if it means letting in "normies" then you are content with corporate controlled social media continuing to dominate our lives. Which sounds about right for humanity. The smugness is vile.
Just bring on the vacuum decay event already.
Maybe it’s personal bias but I’d put a lot more weight into the comments about
While I understand the power, the ideal of multiple federated servers, I still see it as an impediment for use. I know there’s online descriptions but I fail to see why I need to research and choose a server, especially when none really have the membership to support smaller communities yet
The tough part for me is that the reason I use Reddit is for bullshitting with people about sports teams I like. Lets look at some of the communities here.
I'd love to get off reddit but until there's actually people to talk with, this place is just never going to meet the needs of sports content that I use Reddit for. I had no interest in Bluesky until some people actually got on it as well. The Shutdown Fullcast for college football brought a bunch of people and fans there so it gave some utility to the site. Without utility, there's no reason to be here.
Who volunteers to fix it?
Good.
Is this a poll result or an opinion? Because I like the Lemmy UX a lot better than reddit. I appreciate the single-page-app approach. But I use a PC, seems like most people do everything on phones now.
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?
People forget that user experience isn't just the stuff on the screen you interact with. There is a governance piece that is lacking in a lot of instances, and in the open source community as a whole. A lot of the successful projects out there are backed by some kind of foundation.
Take a look at the latest Hexbear drama. Some person out there owned the domain for their instance and let it expire. Now they are in a bidding war with a crypto site with a hexagon-related name. If they had formed some kind of organization or entity that registered the domain and owned the instance, this probably wouldn't have happened. Their users wouldn't get redirected to a domain auction site when trying to access the site. That's not an ideal user experience. It destroys trust.
SDF being a 501c(7) is one of the reasons that it's my home instance. For me, it provides a level of trust that an instance run by some random person on the internet doesn't. If there is a big federation/defederation debate, then it's really up to the membership to decide, and not a collection of admins or a single person getting the vibe of the users.
Another thing to remember is that Lemmy really shouldn't be competing against Reddit. The purpose of Reddit is to have the user generate content in order to keep the user's attention on the site so they can sell targeted advertisements. This is the basic business model for all of commercial social media. It has nothing to do with creating communities. That is secondary. If you want more people on Lemmy so that there is more content for you to consume, just stay on Reddit or TikTok. They need to sell ads in order to fund model training to keep your engagement up in order to sell more ads in order to provide quarterly growth to their shareholders. If you want more people on Lemmy because more brains mean better communities, then focus the communities.
The real opportunity for the fediverse is getting a lot of the existing non-profits, social organizations, and other types of communities to set up their own instances. This answers the “what instance do I join?” question by joining the instance associated with the community you're already involved in. Another reason I'm on SDF is retro computing. If you're really into your local makerspace, then you probably have a community ready to go for a Lemmy instance. If you're involved in your HOA and you all have a Facebook page or are all over Nextdoor, maybe set up a Lemmy instance. In all these cases, the organizational infrastructure is there for the administrative stuff like getting a domain and paying for hosting.
Also, I'm old enough to remember that Facebook took off when everyone's parents started joining. Imagine if the AARP rolled out a Lemmy instance. They are big enough put some serious money into development. You would probably get a lot of accessibility improvements.
P.S.
Check out how theATL.social is organized. The guy did as a LLC, but he seems to be community focused and transparent.
https://yall.theatl.social/post/201135
There was a lot of debate about this when the reddit exodus happened in 2023. I initially joined then and have stuck around since. Something that was said a lot back then that I agree with is that Lemmy doesn't have to compete with reddit. It's alright for this corner of the internet to exist and not be the single dominant one.
If someone makes a reddit clone somewhere else with more liberal admins, good for them. I wouldn't be going there. The fact that Lemmy is sectioned into servers is part of the appeal. I'm glad that I can be part of a server with very progressive administration. I would never get this level of moderation and support from any other social media. I'm fine with that meaning that uninformed people who just want to doom-scroll are less likely to come here.
We have seen growth periods time and again when problems arise with private social media companies. Each time, a little more people from the initial wave join for good. I think that's fine. Most lemmy servers are run for free by people who just believe in what we're doing here. We can always add more servers, but we can't handle the kind of traffic that reddit handles. We're entirely dependent on dedicated people investing large amounts of their time to create and maintain these spaces for us.
Oh so we badmouthing & smearing the Fediverse huh.
Ok let's ask them what counts as a "Good UI/UX" & "Endless wars" ? Really ?
IMHO, the UX is bad, but the user base is also repellant. It's further left than Reddit so most people who jump in bounce right off. That's going to be difficult to change organically. Especially because most users respond to this with "good." So there's definitely no appetite to appeal to a wider audience. I predict Lemmy will become increasingly ideologically partisan and isolated.
Could there be an option for a sorting hat that could either: look at the redditor's post history and determine a good server for them or simply spin the wheel. Either way would get the lazies shit posting without them having to learn anything about fediverse. I know I would have just spun the wheel.
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.o
Multiple 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.
"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.
Its so nice tho, all the alternative front ends are fire, I like all the ios apps, I prefer it to reddits garbage, they made it worse every update down to forcing answers to take up a tab in the last one
