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?
Tell them that if you join any Lemmy instance (e.g. Marxist-Leninist instance of Lemmy (not Hexbear)) and if you ignore some stuff on the instance, then it’s a pretty compelling experience.
Good UI (in my android app) is the reason I came to Lemmy.
I don’t know, feddit.nl is pretty chill. I always see everything and barely anything objectable
it’s ok, it’s a filter
I disagree. I’m an ex tech guy, and I found it to be a pain in the ass. I really appreciate everything that everyone here does, but it’s empty enough that I recognize a number of users. The average person isn’t signing up. At 50k active users, our voice is small.
I don’t know what the grand vision is, but if it’s to provide the people with a corporate free perform, there needs to be… The People.
Yes exactly!!
That’s how you create a bubble of only tech savvy people.
This seems to be quite a problem here, too many techy people and too few people with other interests, sure I’m in the first group myself but even then this is still a problem
Valid point
!communitypromo@lemmy.ca to discover communities!
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)?
I’m going to be holding a teach-in about the fediverse. AFK I mean. Like the people I live with, and am in community with in meat space. They all want to ditch corpo social media, but aren’t sure how. I’ll hold a digital one too for my more extended community, but I want to start with the people I truly live with. I think word of mouth is a great way to onboard people as it allows for a dynamic level of handholding. This is essentially “grassroots” social media after all.
I don’t really want Reddit to join Lemmy en masse. I want the people that see the value of pre-2010 social media, and the “local” internet, to understand and have access to these tools and spaces. I think that will be best done through education, not advertising. Advertising the platform is exactly what all the platforms we want to ditch do, and we are actively trying to not be those platforms.
The sense of “needing” more users, to me at least, is a hold out of the “infinite growth”, capitalist, mindset. I don’t want infinite growth for my instance, I want the people it’s made for to find it, and enjoy communicating with the people they share it with.
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.
I’m not getting what the UX problems are, and if you change things aren’t there just going to be new problems with the changes? I think the default experience is a lot better than Reddit at least.
It might not be a bad experience for you, but it’s a bad experience for what looks like the vast majority of people. Don’t take my word for it, look at the hundreds of upvotes in the post I shared.
It’s on a Bluesky community, there’s a serious bias in those votes
OK but that’s still no explanation. I want to understand the problem deeper than “it’s bad”.
Here’s a great explanation: https://lemmy.ca/comment/14524858
Most of those things are kind of a matter of taste though aren’t they? If you change those kinds of things you’ll get other people complaining who like it as it is now. For example for me I think the default UI is excellent and the alternative ones I’ve tried are mostly terrible, but I know not everyone thinks the same way.
Other complaints are instance-specific but that’s a good thing; instances can operate how they like because we have a choice, that’s the whole benefit to Lemmy and federation.
I’m working on a lemmy app. Will be UI focused!
I switched to Mbin but Lemmy has a variety of interfaces, not so sure this is necessarily a UX issue but an understanding issue.
That is a UX issue.
UX is like a Joke, if you need to explain it to someone, it’s a bad Joke/UX
Explain what exactly?
If you have to explain a joke it loses its meaning. If you have to explain UI, it loses its meaning.
It should be self explanatory.
People here say Lemmy’s UX is fine, and then give a paragraph of instructions a user should follow to get started. They should just be able to start scrolling immediately, and if they want to interact they should be asked to create an account, and a instance suggested.
Sorry, but that’s not really an answer: Explain what you are referring to exactly please?
They can start scrolling immediately on every instance that I’ve seen.
This comment better explains the issues we have: https://lemmy.ca/comment/14524858
Can’t say I agree with all of that and some of it is factually incorrect (Jeroba is the “official” app, for instance, and Interstellar is pretty damn good for another).
Much of what they complain about isn’t exactly UX per se either.
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.
How old are you?
Boost feels a lot like rif which I was using and which shutdown made me switch to lemmy.
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 like. I want a large community and stuff but. The idea of a new Reddit preferring community is weirdly repellent.
I really don’t want to hate on their preferences but also holy shit.
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.
I feel like most the old school redditors have long migrated, I’ve only ever heard good things about the new UI from relatively new users.
Lemmy is old reddit, if not OG internet ethos.
New Reddit gets a lot of complaints too (loading issues, freezing), but it’s aimed at Reddit as a whole since newer users don’t know that old Reddit is an option.
At the same time, if I only ever used new Reddit, I would also think that old Reddit looks wrong
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.
Who cares? If someone can’t figure out how to join a server, then I don’t want them here. If people think that reddit has some amazing UX, then I don’t want them here. If people think another corporate website (bluesky) will save us, then please stay away…
The post about Lemmy has 500 upvotes while the crybaby replies only have like 100. I’ll happily take a ratio of 5 reasonable people joining Lemmy for every 1 weak baby staying on Reddit.
Do you really want mass appeal right now? Just be patient, build good information and ppl will come
We already have good information, the barrier to entry just needs to be lowered
I respectfully disagree. Reddit went downhill and became significantly more difficult to manage/moderate when the masses joined.
If people aren’t willing to invest a bit of time to understand how Lemmy works (and it’s really not that difficult to understand), then I don’t think Lemmy is a good fit for them.
Having a barrier to entry just filters out non tech savvy people, and creates a bubble.
We want all kinds of people on Lemmy, not just tech savvy people.
Do we? I was never asked.
The community as it is right now, feels like the early days of Reddit and Slashdot. I really don’t mind that slight speed bump.
To my knowledge we don’t want to filter out non tech savvy people. If that’s what we want then cool, leave it as is.
But I don’t think that’s true, especially not for all instances.
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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”
Lemmy UX is identical to old Reddit. Come on.
