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?
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?
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.
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?
Why would you? The communities are accessible from every federated instance
https://lemmy.world/c/startrek@startrek.website
My point is you have to pick SOME server to host your account. You are right that most communities are accessible from most servers, but that is where it becomes confusing for someone who just wants to look at memes for a specific fan base.
You can experience each server before making an account, you just can’t post or subscribe. If someone is afraid of creating am account on an instance they may not like (which if I’m being honest is a slightly strange worry, as it costs nothing to sign up, and they can delete the account if they don’t like it), they can spend as much time lurking without an account as they need.
I can’t speak for other people, but if lemmy.world were to shut down today I’d just pick another server.
I will admit, it was confusing and almost turned me off at first. I was very upset about the whole deal with third party apps on Reddit. My daughter gave me the whole email analogy and it cleared my hesitation to join Lemmy.
I don’t know how it is today, but I had to apply to join world when I first got on. It would be awesome if an app would sign a person up for, say, three different servers and sync settings between them. Something goes down, wouldn’t even notice.
Assholes ruin everything though and making it easier for bot accounts to exist would end badly.
I don’t know.
When I first got on here it was a mess. It didn’t work half the time and when it did no content was being generated. I stuck it out though and I’m glad I did.
I’m definitely not the right person to come up with any solutions.
And it’s not like exporting your subs to a CSV file or something to then upload to your new account on your new instance will work. Different instances will have different communities, so it won’t be a 1:1 transition.
I can definitely see the friction for new users if this happens.
We all know people are lazy, so if the friction proposed by Lemmy is more of a burden compared to the inconvenience proposed by Reddit or another social media platform, then people won’t change.
It would be interesting if there could be some tool that proposes similar communities on the instance you’re joining based on the communities you were subscribed to in your previous instance. Community federation could allow for that linked list that could be reverse searched and served to a user, precluded by uploading a CSV file of your previous communities so you don’t have to keep track of individual users in a server somewhere (which is anti-privacy anyways, and Lemmy imho is pro-privacy).
https://lemmy.zip/
https://programming.dev/ is for programming
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/ hosts a lot of queer communities
I prefer !android@lemdro.id to the !android@lemmy.world
I think some servers do that? They definitely try to cater to niches.
Thats topics lol, piefed and mbin, right now I think only admins can make them but they let tou put multiple communtiies under a topic
It is definitely not too late for that.
This isn’t really a federation problem, and more that there isn’t a clear “winner” yet.
Even on centralized platforms, you end up with multiple communities for the same topic, until one of them grows enough to beat out the rest. Then eventually a scandal might cause it to fragment again. There are also separate communities that keep going independently because of ideological differences. See the various international news subreddits
The movies communities here were like that, but now there is a pretty clear “main community”
.ml and world don’t really share the same views and vibes
Some communities consolidated. Electric cars did a few weeks ago. Cooking communities back in the days.
Some communities prefer to stay on their own.
!communitypromo@lemmy.ca is trying to solve that issue, but regularly posting “the” community on a topic. But you can’t prevent everyone to create new communities, the same way 90% of the subreddits are probably empty with a mssing mod
I think that’s more of a feature, not a bug. It means if one group is doing a shitty job of running their community, it’s easier to find another group of the same nature. I’ve noticed a lot of communities on .world are run a lot like the most popular subreddits where moderation of posts is highly aggressive, and seems aimed more at curating “high quality content” than actually being a community. Okay, easy enough, I just start posting to similar places on other instances, or start my own.
Also
Its annoying but I also like it, you get different viewpoints and if you look at the feeds the focusses are usually different, like one might have mostly news and trailers, the other mostly discussions on questions, there are like 10 different shows movies tv communities
deleted by creator
For that side of reddit, you’re right.
But for the uniquely useful side of reddit, federation won’t help. If I post a question like “how do I get this obscure game to run well on this obscure Linux distro?”, nobody is going to repost that for me, and if I don’t maximize the amount of eyeballs on it, it’s unlikely I’ll get an answer. My best choice is to post it on reddit, either in /r/linux_gaming or in the specific game’s subreddit.
I assume that most users who post anything at all on reddit do it to ask questions like that.
And for some reason it seems like half of all distro specific communities are on .ml
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.
Why not https://fedia.io/ ? It uses Mbin, the successor of Kbin
At this point I am lacking motivation to change. Why bother switching now?
It’s up to you, I was just giving you the option
I’ve tried to join lemmy several times since 2021 but I could succeed only a few weeks ago.
I don’t get why new accounts need manual approval.
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?
Is it really a “bad” experience?
A “bad” experience is something like applying for a job online, submitting your resume, then manually entering all the information that’s already on your resume into a thousand little boxes. A “bad” experience is trying to unsubscribe from a service that relies on the pain of that unsubscribe process keeping people paying every month.
Having to choose a server is at most a speed bump. Is it a “bad” experience to choose an email provider?
If that mild speed bump is keeping people from joining, that’s fine. If someone cared enough to make some kind of a GUI that hand-held people through the process of choosing a server, that’s fine too.
IMO, if we’re talking bad experiences, ads on Reddit that are designed to look like posts, that’s a bad experience. Ads that are designed to look like comments, that’s a bad experience. And, the feature coming soon of communities locked behind a paywall, that’s a really bad experience.