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?
Couldn’t we design an “onboarder” where when you get started on lemmy, a “let’s get you started” wizard asks you 2 or 3 questions and based on your answers, it proposes 2 or 3 servers (or directly assigns you to one)?
join-lemmy.org already has this in a way:
The problem here is that those are filters, and the newcomer will usually still be faced with several options, which will still make them scratch their head.
A wizard is a good idea, with simple questions, rather than filter buttons.
But it needs to end up telling you “here you go, this is the one you want!”, giving you just a single instance. Doesn’t matter that multiple will probably match the answers given - then just pick one at random. Chances are, they will be equally happy on either, and if not, well, it isn’t very hard to switch to a new instance later on, when they have become regular Lemmists.
Thanks for sharing! Very much aligned with what i have in mind… Only difference would be to narrow down to 1 or 2 (if at all) on the landing screen - maybe all other options are under a “advanced user? Click here to expand server selection” or something like that…
I agree, but people (read: instance owners) might disagree who gets to be seen up top and who won’t make that cut.
It’s a tough dilemma in itself, I will say. In the end, I think we should move this part of the joining experience until after new users are familar with the software.
So new users land at “lemmy.noob” or something, and when they are ready to spread their wings, they can choose the things I showed above to go and find the right home for them.
Something like this sounds great
Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
I don’t really want them here, but I’d rather them be here than on reddit. Reddit is more toxic than this place and a lot of that comes top down. At least here people can spin off an instance the minute admins/mods act like dicks. There, the culture just gets worse and festers and it contributes to toxicity in the world outside itself. Imagine if the r/theDonald pricks have been ostracized and started their own instance which most instances defederated with quickly.
Thats my view, I prefer that Lemmy is small, I’ve had enough of the greater internet tbh
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
It’s not difficult though. They just can’t be arsed and are making excuses for being comfortable and lazy. If there was a $100 million marketing budget and their favourite celebrity was here, they’d sit an hour long entrance exam. The best we can do is make it fun enough here that people want to comment.
We should try to do both, give a good UX and make it fun.
Everyone benefits from good UX
Exactly. If this minimal effort is keeping people out - GOOD. If you can’t put the bare minimum effort in, then you’ll just be another mindless TikTok type person and we really don’t need those.
Honestly, if picking a server is too difficult, how have you survived this long? It’s literally like picking an email host. That’s the UX people are complaining about. How far have we fallen that making a choice is now a problem? “Pick what you like” leads to people going “OMG, this is terrible, I have to make my own decisions😭😭” No wonder people love AI, because they can’t think for themselves.
The only improvement would be setting a default or giving them themes to choose from which they are interested in and selecting a server for them based on that.
I think it’s less about ux and more about being confused. People aren’t faking being confused. I’m pretty tech savvy but had to do a double take. Still don’t fully understand the nuances of federation after over a year and a half. I don’t really need to understand all of it though.
I think the most important part to understand with lemmy is that the choice of server doesn’t matter that much because you can read and post on all the other servers as well. Unless you choose hexbear or whatever it is called these days. :)
But it really is a problem when people can’t be bothered to choose from more than exactly one. I mean if you can make a selection from several different brands of toilet paper in a supermarket then why is it so hard to choose a server?
Have you ever been on Facebook? Ever read the illiterate moronic uneducated garbage that people post as fact? It’s called ‘my truth’; maybe because it’s only true in their sphere (of one).
There are going to be a seriously large number of people totally flummoxed by that question.
There are aspects that could be better, sure. I think communities should be like sets of posts, subject to unions, conjuctions, and other set operations. Then you wouldnt have the issue of 5 versions of c/memes, they could be virtually joined into one memes community at the user level (and the user can filter out instances icon unities risers they don’t like of course). Moderation could be decoupled from communities and made a broader service that users choose to interact with, agreeing to a level of moderation comfortable for their experience.
But also, put me in the group that thinks lemmy should stay small. Corpo social has convinced us that a single big room with every idiot and literally their mother screaming into it is how the internet should be and it isn’t. We can go back to smaller, focused online communities that don’t openly invite everyone to come in and fight.
Centralization tendencies are all rooted in power and control. We need to fragment more.
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…
The reddit concept of subreddits also doesn’t work well with federation IMO (at least no Lemmy’s implementation).
Want to talk about video games? Well, there’s no /r/games, instead there are bunch of different /c/games on different servers with varying amounts of activity. You basically gotta make the “pick a server” decision again whenever you post something. If you make the wrong choice, your post might not get seen by anyone, and even if you post to the biggest sub, you’ll be missing out on eyeballs from people on other servers who aren’t subscribed to that instance for whatever reason.
For example, lemmy.ml/c/linux_gaming and lemmy.world/c/linux_gaming have around the same number of subscribers. Should I post to both? Maybe the same people subscribe to both, so that’s pointless? Or maybe I’ll miss out on a lot of discussion if I post only to one? There’s no way for me to know.
For me, it makes Lemmy less useful than reddit for asking really niche questions and getting useful answers. For posting comments on whatever pops up in my feed though, it works great.
I don’t have any good solutions to this, and I’m sure it has been considered already. When I first joined, I remembered seeing people bring this same issue up, but it doesn’t seem like it went anywhere? (Or maybe it did?)
Man. You just gave me an idea (which would matter if I wasn’t a complete idiot).
Instead of servers that all attempt to be a sort of clone of Reddit, servers could focus on content similar to the way subreddits work.
So you’d join any one of these servers and federate with other servers just like now, only content would be focused between servers.
Example:
This server is a games server. It has /c/games, /c/fallout, /c/vintagegaming, etc.
This server will focus on news and politics. It has /c/worldnews, /c/marketnews, etc.
Sure, it would still have the issue of being fractured, but it would narrow it down so much that it would be more appealing and easier to navigate.
It’s probably too late for that.
Ultimately, I’m happy with the fediverse. Algorithms aren’t dictating what I see. There’s no profit incentive that will lead to bad decisions, so when bad decisions are made, folks will talk about it and come to a solution.
I miss old Reddit, but it’s gone.
It is definitely not too late for that.
That’s what that Star Trek server did.
The problem with that is that you need to make a user on one of those servers. Do you make it on the politics one, or the games one? What happens 3 months later when you realize the server you picked on a whim is full of assholes and gets defederated?
Do you think an average user at that point would move their subscriptions to a new account or will they get annoyed at the concept?
I think some servers do that? They definitely try to cater to niches.
The idea that one must commit, is the problem. At first, I signed up for 3 or 4 servers. It needs to be pointed out that no commitment is necessary.
So now you are telling a user to make 3 or 4 accounts at once
Not necessarily. That’s just what I did.
The point is, they aren’t making a permanent decision. They can switch or move at any time for any reason.
People like to commit, though. They want to commit. They want to make an account and be done. The ability for established users and communities to move around is a great feature that makes Lemmy superior to other sites, but it really needs to work on making new users feel comfortable enough to stay put when they’re first figuring things out, because if a new user decides to leave, they’re probably not switching instances, they’re switching platforms.
That’s a good point. May be true.
Was your experience different between those 3-4 servers or was it pretty much universally consistent?
One didn’t allow down votes. Seemed like a good idea. I rarely down vote. But in practice, when I do it’s for a reason. And I want the option.
Another went down for roughly a week. So that didn’t work out.
Which is one reason I embraced Communick; a paid instance. Been here since.
I originally joined KBin because I liked the interface better than lemmy.
When I joined lemmy.world I just picked it because it was the most populous.
I haven’t even given it a second thought about changing because I don’t know why I would. It seems pretty arbitrary which instance you join.
I like the analogy that Lemmy is like an email provider. Many possible providers, one Internet. Maybe we could get more traction if Lemmy were promoted in a similar manner? Or even have email service like sdf.org?
So they want to replace a social media site ran by rich fucks with a social media site run by rich fucks?
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.
99% of gamblers quit right before they win big /j
Really? You never ran into the endless “…furthermore, .ml must be defederated” posts?
I’ve seen it a few times but it’s really easy to avoid tbh
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.
What would prevent the same happening in the next wave of rats jumping ship? They don’t know anything about the servers or their niches, so they pick whatever. Listing all the servers and their missions is a good start for those motivated to join, but for those more on the fence, how do we ease the transition?
I personally see three big issues with getting new users to Lemmy use and stat on Lemmy:
- knowing about it: It is a matter of time before Reddit bans linking to Lemmy. Either by outright preventing their discussion via shadow deletes or full deletes. join-lemmy.org would be well served by purchasing ads on Google and on Bing
- join-lemmy ux needs to be improved: this goes to your point and I fully agree that there needs to be a better onboarding experience. I am a fairly technical guy and even I had trouble understanding the major concepts behind Lemmy. Many of these concepts aren’t terribly important to a new user though. At least at first.
- more and better content: this is fortunately getting better but we’re not there yet
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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.
this is about 0.1% of posts… quit lying
Sure, but trends seem to hit harder here, probably because we’re smaller. There have been weeks where it seemed like 60% of the non text posts in my feed were about jeans or beans or vegan cat food. Those probably weren’t more than 0.1% of posts, but they sure felt overwhelming at the time.
You can either face reality or not, literally nobody cares about your opinion on the matter. Many people who don’t join lemmy say this, that is simple fact.
okay, bye!
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
Facebook has servers all over the world; there’s not just one Facebook server although it appears to users like that. What would be the effect of asking (potential) Facebook users which server they would like to join?
In a somewhat related question, does anyone know how the extra-instance account transfer request is going? Not sure where to look to find out.
Uh yeah. I’ve got no clue how to find new communities? Instances? Groups? Whatever the hell the equivalent of a subreddit is called. It’s not user friendly at all.
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.
People need to stop sending people to “join ___” sites. I get why they are, or at least were, necessary, but they’re totally superfluous when users are making recommendations to other users.
Just recommend a website for them to join. Word of mouth + systematized signup makes zero sense.
Just recommend a website for them to join.
But the crux is which one do you recommend? We don’t want to send everyone to the same instance otherwise it’ll end up becoming dominant (see Lemmy World).
Ideally we shouldn’t need to go through this motion of trying to work out which instance to choose or recommend one for them, they should be able to do that themselves after getting their feet wet.
We don’t want to send everyone to the same instance otherwise it’ll end up becoming dominant (see Lemmy World)
From what I’ve learnt in network science, I’ve got bad news for you: real-world networks tend to follow power-law distributions.
Lemmy, being a social network, is unlikely to be an exception. Some instances are going to become hubs and the rest would be peripheral.
Sadly you’re probably right. It would be nice if there were some load balancing mechanism where restrigrations could be shut for the larger instances where it recognises that it’s grown much larger than the rest, and recommend altnerative instances.
I think a good solution would be to randomly send people to one of the top 5 instances that aren’t very political (What ever that might be)
According to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy, the top 5 (where top 5 is defined by user count) are:
- lemmy.world
- lemm.ee
- sh.itjust.works
- hexbear
- lemmy.dbzer0
After there’s:
- beehaw
- lemmygrad
- programming.dev
- lemmy.ca
Lemmy.world is pretty safe and generic, but it’s already huge (173k users vs 33k of lemm.ee).
Lemm.ee is also a safe bet.
Hexbear is totally out of question
dbzer0 is great, but it leans heavily in a political direction
The analysis paralysis of having to pick an instance is definitely the biggest hurdle in my opinion. I don’t think a read-only instance is the solution though, at least not one that requires registration. That just adds another step, which I think would further confuse people. The simplest way to onboard new people is to just shove them onto the biggest instance, but I know that kind of goes against the ideology and creed of the fediverse. There were endless debates about it during the Reddit exodus of 2023.
Being able to just browse without signup and see largely federated content would pull in a lot of people. I am new to federated concepts, but would a generic, non-profit “home page” that’s browseable without signup is possible? Apps like Voyager could dump newbies into that until they want to post/interact?
Yeah you can browse an instance without being logged in, so that would be possible.
Read only instance would put them off too. The best solution, IMO:
- create a pool of instances that will act as the default ones
- when creating an account, create it on one of the instances, redirect the user there
- add an option to migrate an account to a different instance in case the user wants to choose a different one after a month or so
By read-only, I mean they couldn’t create any communities. So essentially it would be an instance that has accounts but nothing else. Users would still be able to vote and comment on other commnities and subscribe. They could stay on it if they wanted to, but of course they wouldn’t be able to create any communities.
That doesn’t help at all, I’d say. Most people won’t ever create communities.
Like the other person said, 99% of users never create communities anyway. I don’t really know what this read-only instance is meant to solve.
It would solve the problem of choosing an instance, as the join Lemmy process would sign you up to that automatically rather than making them choose an instance.
Exactly this - Join-Lemmy.org has some (minor) UI and text issues. I’m also not quite happy about the sorting of the instances and the selection there. If f.e. you chose “General -> English” during onboarding, you get this screen here:
Hexbear? Some random 11 user instance from finland? Lemmy.world nowhere to be seen? They are randomizing the instances, which kind of makes sense to prevent the bigger ones from growing even more, but which might confuse new users.
But those are minor UI quirks that can be solved. All those reddit couch warriors that claim that everything should be completely redone exactly how they want it to be are insane. Normal users are able to understand the concept of instances.
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.
i came here to say the same thing! if people actually genuinely like the new reddit ui, those people might just want and need different things out of a website than we do, and trying to onboard them might be a fool’s errand. not to be a gatekeeper, i’d love if everyone quit the corporate web, but a lot of the things people complain about here like the ui and the decentrilization are why i’m here (in my case mbin) and not there to begin with
same thing with mastodon, people still rail against it’s ui but the ui was a big reason i even made a mastodon long before twitter was bought out, back when they first tried to phase out the chronological timeline
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
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.
Something else to keep in mind is that most Redditors nowadays (like Twitter and Bluesky users) are mobile users. I think a lot of Lemmy mobile apps have a good UI and solve that problem. However, it’s hard to point new users at a single website/app/etc to join. Bluesky does that. Obviously, that’s bad for decentralization, but Bluesky is also still a beta protocol that’s headed toward decentralization at some point. Their single instance was necessary for them at the start.
When a new/small social media platform that acts as an alternative of a bigger platform pops up, one of the common topics on the alternative are people talking about how it’s better than the old place and/or just trashing the old place. Eventually, they outgrow that (assuming that platform survives). I feel like that’s happened with Bluesky. Browsing it, everyone seems to be talking about their own usual topics now, and I see very few posts calling out Twitter or comparing Bluesky to Twitter nowadays.
Lemmy still feels like it’s in that “bash the old place” stage to me. Maybe ~20% or posts I see are talking about Reddit or talking about Lemmy in relation to Reddit. It’s annoying.
If you mention Lemmy, point someone towards a specific instance so it’s not so much of a shock. Then they can slowly learn about what it is.
I am very new here, and not as passionate about the fediverse as some of you are (like your average redditor most likely).
Reading the comments here I think that the fact that you notice decentralization as a user can be a problem for many but offering simple instance lists, community lists in the UI can mitigate that and make it more a feature than a nuisance (for those that have trouble navigating it).
On desktop, I don’t mind switching servers with different URLs, especially since I can read them all with the same proton UI. However, on mobile (I spend more time on social media via mobile than desktop, I imagine most people do these days) using the Jerboa app I cannot figure out how to “visit” another server. I can’t enter the URL, I cannot click on the URL, I cannot search for @URL and get a list of the communities hosted on it…
I am sure there is documentation somewhere explaining how I achieve this, but I should not have to look for that just to acces different instances. I use lemmy on breaks mostly and as I said, am not passionate enough about social media to read manpages for it… I imagine some will think “then we don’t need people like you here”, but in the end if close-to mainstream user adoption is a goal, you kind of will need people who just want to look at cats and discover communities as well, and making jumping between instances and finding communities is an important part of making that happen.
Edit: I do not think having an official sign up is a solutiom btw, I think different servers are neat, and I most likely will sign up to another I am more in line with when I know which are available. It is neat to choose a home server, but it should be seemless to find others. There is no need to obfuscate servers and pretend everything is centralized, but having easy access to a centralized list of servers and communities built into the UI seems like a must for me.
That happened to me in the reddit exodus, I switched to Lemmy and faced a lot of analysis paralysis, ended up in Lemmy.world out of spite and then I regretted my decision.
So yeah, in my experience it’s bad UX design, it felt like gatekeeping tbh.
