Agreed. But as long as people don’t actively leave Lemmy in favor of the new service I’d be okay with it I guess. I mean it would still be cool if Lemmy grew larger but hey, we got a nice little community here

Text-based forums are a niche. The vast majority of the population doesn’t like that format. There’s a reason no Bluesky has emerged, the appeal is just not there.

About Bluesky, there was an app that allowed “Reddit view” (so threads with votes). Can’t find it back right now, the search mostly show Flashes, the Instagram alternative, which probably reflects the larger interest for that type of format.

I think the irony here is that the user-friendliness experience of Bluesky stems from it being a centralized service (in practice). I seriously doubt most people who signed up for Bluesky even understand what “decentralized social media” means.

I’m not saying Lemmy (and the greater Fediverse) can’t improve, but it’s clear that the biggest barrier for most people is the decentralized aspect itself – the core of the Fediverse – which is something one shouldn’t really “hide”.

As long as the state of social media usership demands centralized practices, then the Fediverse will forever be at a disadvantage in gaining mass adoption in my opinion.

It’s a solved problem. Check out phtn.app and vger.app also Alexandrite, Next and Tesseract. Like the problem is solved 5 times over.

Serious question here: what is the bad ux experience of lemmy compared to reddit? (except choosing an instance in the beginning, I get that this might turn off a lot of people)

Easy fix, if it isnt federated I give them a one star and talk about how im tired of ads and corporate influence in my discussion forums so id rather use the threadiverse, prob does nothing but if it gets even one person to google and switch it was worth the 5 seconds it took to type

Something like phtn.app really should be the default

Disclaimer: Photon is great and the dev does a fantastic job. Also, the beta is open, please give them feedback on !photon@lemdro.id

However, there as still issues induced by not using the default UI. One of the instances I used added photon as p.instance for a while

Photon was still in early stages, and there was a bug preventing it to load for some people (Firefox users IIRC). In the end the admin switched to Tesseract.

lemdro.id has photon as a Default, but it took them a while to the latest version, for quite some time it wasn’t ideal. I would still go to l.lemdro.id just because the Comments view was available, or because some other info was missing/hidden.

Lemmy releases new versions quite regularly, and there are usually a few bugs. Photon development is independent, and the Photon dev has to catch-up with those. Add admins sometimes limited availability to the mix and the experience can really become subpar.

Agreed. I really like the default UI personally but I know it’s not exactly the most new-user-friendly and modern. There is also tesseract: tesseract.dubvee.org/communities/lemmy.world

If the UI is the problem, the lemmy devs are working on a more modern looking UI using daisyUI atm.

We already have good information, the barrier to entry just needs to be lowered

That’s how you create a bubble of only tech savvy people.

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.

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.

If that was a legitimate issue, MMO’s (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn’t have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.

But in an MMO, you still get the same content no matter what server you choose. Over here, it directly impacts what content you can interact with based on (de)federation.

The only real federation dramas I can think of were relating to Hexbear and Beehaw. If Greenleaf was on one of those instances then maybe it could explain their skewed perspective. Otherwise yeah, I don’t get it.

eh, back when the “exodus” was happening it felt like every second post is about defederation. Nowadays you don’t hear much about it anymore, but if you only looked back then I see how you could come to that conclusion.

I specifically remember looking up tables of who defederates from who and what instances allow NSFW or downvoting because this was an issue among some of the top instances back then.

I ended up making 4 different accounts over 2 months until I landed on a server I’m happy with. That will never be acceptable to any normal user.

Every time someone brings up these issues, people here downplay them like you are doing it right now and nothing is ever done about it.

There are definitely issues with Lemmy but these users specifically seem to just be complaining for the sake of complaining. They want Reddit without the parts they currently don’t like, not realizing that they also need to get rid of the parts that eventually made Reddit go to the shitter - because otherwise it’d just repeat.

Ah yes, because telling people the reason they don’t join your platform is invalid is sure to make them change their minds. 🙄

0 marketing sense. People like you are why the Reddit userbase mostly steers clear.

The vast majority of users don’t like the old.reddit view, else reddit would have that as default.

People are still on Twitter while the owner makes Nazi salutes and Bluesky is a 1:1 replacement feature-wise with a modern interface. People just don’t like to move.

UX means "user experience". It is distinct from the UI. OP is basically saying the process of signing up to federated social media is too complicated for the average user, not because of the way it looks and how you interact with it (the UI) but because of it's not as easy to understand the concepts behind how Lemmy works.

Having to choose a server and it influencing what content you can see is the biggest UX issue, not the availability of apps.

While not necessarily about the upvotes I find the users here are still very much about being _Right_™ or trying to be the most liked and therefore the most conformed to their community.

The updoots may not matter but people for sure act like they do or want them to.

Thank you I appreciate all the input, I won’t have the time or energy to drive something like that. I can get behind a cause like that and help push it, but won’t be able to lead.

I’d love a place where there is no politics, it might also be appealing to many and I think it should be the default.

piefed.social has user-level instance muting similar to Mastodon

You can literally block instances as a user on Lemmy and have been able to do so good quite some time. No need to run your own instance.

The UI is fine, you can use Photon or other modern UI’s

The UX is the problem (User Experience), the defaults just suck and many will give up before even knowing better UI’s exist, or finding the right settings to make the default UI work for them.

Just picking a instance is intimidating and many will give up before that, we should guide them to pick an instance or choose a default and give them the option to change.

That is a UX issue.

UX is like a Joke, if you need to explain it to someone, it’s a bad Joke/UX

We should do both.

Give people a good UX, and build solid communities.

Honestly, I think federation being (mostly) invisible is actually part of the problem. Trying to make these spaces look like something they’re not makes people believe they work in a way that they don’t. It makes “Lemmy” look like wish-dot-com Reddit, and Mastodon look like temu Twitter.

This is all something new. This is a thousand Reddits, where you can see over the fence at what each other Reddit is talking about. It’s ten-thousand Twitters, where you can talk to people on other Twitters.

If you could post on Facebook articles from Twitter, people would get that maybe they don’t see every single comment, or every single Facebook article all of the time. This would be understood. Twitter and Facebook look like, and are discussed as if, they’re two totally different websites. The same would be true of AVForums and CivicForums, if they could cross-post.

But fediverse platforms go out of their way to hide what they are, and to strip each website of its identity. And that seems wildly fucked up to me.

Idk I turn on the instance names on every app idk why they keep trying to hide the federation and how it works, it makes this experience unique, I dont want the same boring shit I already hated but was stuck with

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.

That’s the feature! Not a bug.

The new reddit design sucks and always has, other than dark mode.

Boost feels a lot like rif which I was using and which shutdown made me switch to lemmy.

How old are you?

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

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

Exactly.

UX is like a Joke, if you need to explain it to someone it’s bad UX

You did it, you saved Lemmy

And? We want all kinds of people on Lemmy not just ‘skilled’ people

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.

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.

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.

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

I’ve seen it a few times but it’s really easy to avoid tbh

There are a few .world posters who make two to three posts a day about how much they hate lemmygrad hexbear and .ml.

Not necessailly federation, but I’ve seen a lot of people prejudge commenters for what instance they’re a part of, most commonly calling people from .ml or hexbear tankies just for being on .ml or hexbear. It gets old really quickly.

I haven’t heard about any of that drama since the early days when things were still getting sorted out

.

It seems like Lemmy should offer really easy research data for people to back these claims up. Like just counting “Lemmy sucks” vs “Lemmy is awesome”

From everyone looking in: what the fuck is, ok, was Hexbear, why should I care and wtf can’t I read anything from that place.

Same with registration, instances, etc. It’s explained nowhere where how and why and i never have found a complete index with instances and communities.

I only can use lemmy because of sync. Yes, I’m also a reddit refugee.

When you read that stuff on reddit there’s a parameter you need to keep in mind : these people are not really discussing Lemmy. They’re rationalizing and justifying why they are not on Lemmy. Totally different conversation.

Nobody wants to come out and say “I know mainstream platforms are shit and destroying the fabric of reality but I can’t bring myself to be on a platform except it is the Hip Place to Be”. So they’ll invent stuff that paints them in a good light.

You’ll still see people claiming that Mastodon is unusable because you have to select an instance - even though you don’t have to, you can just type Mastodon on Google, click the first link, and create an account in 2 clicks. It’s been ages. But the people still using Twitter need the excuse because otherwise what does it make them?

Oh yeah, I don’t even know which one I signed up to without looking.

Been here a while now and I really like it. Doesn’t hurt that I’m a lefty that loves star trek, though.

It can be quiet at times and I don’t really have much to share, myself - but that’s not a bad thing to me. Easier to set it down sometimes.

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?

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.

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:

<img alt="" src="https://feddit.org/pictrs/image/c01f8943-6a24-457c-9b0b-439e1e4a89d3.png">

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.

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.

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

I wish just like NSFW filter, posts can be marked as Political, and users have the option to block all of that.

If you are looking for an app, Voyager is the best in my opinion. It’s totally feature complete afaik

Addition to 10. And if a thread is not about america or politics, someone in the comments will still twist the subject to rant about it.

And 11. Lemmy has a disproportionate cynical middle aged nerd population. Like the people on this post thinking ‘old reddit-like ui’ was a compliment. Seeing the ‘I only use vim’ guy once is amusing. Scrolling down and seeing a dozen more sends a distinct ‘this place is not for you’ vibe.

you already have to deal with choice paralysis.

“Lemmy has 47k monthly active users

• discuss.online if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
• sopuli.xyz if you want a server located in the EU
• vger.app/settings/install if you want an app

Feel free if you have any questions”

lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37336391

my feed is full of communist vs communist vs non-communist drama. Can we frickin’ chill?

Block those communities?

About the lack of an algorithm: do we really want to recreate the addictiveness of for-profit platforms? Is that actually a healthy feature? Perhaps it’s better for society if our social media isn’t as addictive as possible.

And on manual validation for sign-ups: before the mass migration from Reddit, most instances didn’t seem to have validation, and then as it became popular, we got hit with trolls mass creating accounts posting CP and racist images, making it a game of whack-a-mole to stop it. As Lemmy is all volunteer run, we don’t have paid content moderators always watching for that stuff, nor did they have an automated content filter. The main solution is to validate sign-ups so that the moderators and admins are not overwhelmed with spam and illegal content (which they could be legally liable for if not dealt with properly).

There’s no “main” app. Think about Reddit before the API fees. There used to be a default app.

Which app was this? Reddit’s 1st party app? I didn’t think it was very popular until they did the API fees, I never used it and I don’t know anyone who did. Lemmy’s 1st party app is Jerboa.

If you have ideas for how to fix these issues, you should file issues on Github for how to improve

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues (or report the issues to whatever app you’re using)

There’s no recommendations feed.

Is quiblr.com like what you’re talking about? quiblr.com/understanding_your_private_personalize…

Thank you for your comment, hope you like it here.

.

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.

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?)

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?

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.

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.

Why April 16th?

Why not keep your account to talk about Lemmy?

!communitypromo@lemmy.ca

What did people say when you posted and asked for help?

Lemmyverse.net is the best way to search across all instances for communities that would interest you.

Whatever the hell the equivalent of a subreddit is called.

That’s communities. Did you have issues with the communities link at the top of the page? You can switch it to the “All” view.

Also what the other comments said is good too, like for finding a very niche community I’ll use lemmyverse.net/communities

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

Thats my view, I prefer that Lemmy is small, I’ve had enough of the greater internet tbh

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.

It would be nice to have thriving communities for niche things. That can only really happen when there’s decent numbers though. I do understand the hesitation though.

A much larger userbase will bring its own problems for instance admins, where I’m sure it’ll start turning into full-time jobs to keep the lights on.

Eternal September.

I still recall the digg migration.

Sort of a hypocrite through cause I’m part of the Reddit 3rd Party API migration…

Yes, I want my niche communities back.

That’s a pretty good point. If it’s “too hard” to join up on here that sure is a good filter to keep out the Facebook ding dongs.

I still have to add ‘reddit’ to my searches when looking for niche issues, opinions, and reviews.
Would hope in the future I can add ‘lemmy’ instead and be rid of reddit for good

No. Too much attention here would be a bad thing with governments the world over leaning toward authoritarianism.

thats how it got shitty, you get thousands of pointless comments, reposts and bot accounts upvoted to the front page

I thought that when I first joined, as the weeks pass, its turned into a no, I like the community here, reddit is just a headache that I was addicted to

Something like this sounds great

join-lemmy.org already has this in a way:

<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ade4e2af-7a4f-43c2-9c98-c649658b341c.png"> <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f50cef4d-ab81-44b0-b278-944c649a0b88.png"> <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/747348d9-98c6-47c9-8aa8-46c188138ef4.png">

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.

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?

Isn’t this why apple is popular. It just picks everything for you.

Maybe ~20% or posts I see are talking about Reddit or talking about Lemmy in relation to Reddit. It’s annoying.

People talk about Reddit now due to the influx last week.

Usually Reddit isn’t that discussed.

extra-instance account transfer request is going?

You mean settings or content?

Settings have been exportable for a while now.

Content cannot be and probably never will. Even Mastodon doesn’t allow it:

Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.

docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

they could be virtually joined into one memes community at the user level

Good luck with !politics from LW, hexbear and feddit.org colliding

Lemmy is supposed to be the best of both worlds. Smaller internet communities not owned by big corpos and federated together.

I use eternity, used infinity beforehand so it basically felt like no change when migrating (eternity is a lemmy fork of infinity)

Have you tried blocking some communities?

Hopefully some instances will move away from that thinking and not gatekeep

If that’s true then the problem will solve itself when Mbin or PieFed overtakes Lemmy. The content will be there anyways, we just need to see who brings the best UX/UI (or whatever frontend/app)

Yeah if it looked like new reddit I wouldn’t be here. That site is ass. IDK how anyone can stand to use it.

The core issue is none of my hobbies exist on Lemmy. I tried really hard to populate those instances but there were just 3 (three) people engaging in discussions. What even is the point?

Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media (which Reddit is). Without attracting new users Lemmy will almost certainly perish. It’s goal should be a low bar to onboard new social media users coming from places like Reddit, Facebook, X.

Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.

Unpopular opinion maybe but I like Lemmy and lemmy users and I’m glad that we’re a bit different from Reddit. At least in my experience it feels a bit different.

Lmao, so true. Buhh my user experience!! As if consuming endless amounts of garbage on reddit is a good experience.

Or even just accepting a default, or a randomly assigned one.

There was something in retail I learned. There are people who will come in on sale days, and they will demand perfect customer service, and demand the lowest prices, and ask for more sales and bring coupons, all while talking about how they spend so much money there and that they’re so loyal. Then they’ll leave and you’ll never see them again

You can spend time and effort with them, the ones who only care about the cheapest place, or you can spend time with the customers who are actually there regularly. The ones who get to know your names, who are loyal, or enjoy a sale sure but also will be there even when there isn’t one.

I don’t want to attract users simply because reddit bad, and cater our experience for people who can’t bother to learn just the basic tenant of the fediverse. I want to cater our experiences for those who are here daily, and the ones who are genuinely interested. It’s the longer slower approach, but we’ll stay more true to our goals

With discord, though, the “server” part is largely hidden from the user or at least transparent - that’s the thing. It simplifies the same concept into something more tangible.

you can change later

You won’t bring everything over

it won’t impact things

Lies! It will impact a LOT of things. Primarily your admins and federation. How could you possibly say that changing servers allows you to pick different admins (which is a good thing) but then say that the server doesn’t matter? Plus there’s server culture.

you can interact with any instance

Depends what server you’re on

That was Aol.

People these days look weird at you if don’t use Gmail so you can’t see their Google Calendar invite or some other thing that only works with Google… People are literally pushing tech monopolies.

Except everyone just uses gmail now

Strawman

At no point has Gmail ever said “we’re no longer allowing you to send/receive emails to/from Hotmail” or has Yahoo said “we’re maintained by a single volunteer who because of real life stuff can no longer continue so we’re discontinuing our email service.”

But this literally happens with instances all the time.

They don’t understand what federation is

They can’t use email…?

Agree. It’s not about being smug or entitled or whatever. Getting a simple lemmy client on your phone and signing up for the most basic instances takes literally 5 minutes of reading tops. And that’s for non tech savvy readers. If you can’t put 5 minutes of effort into an online discussion forum setup, then how can you be expected to put even 5 minutes of effort into a discussion post or in reading an article before commenting?

It’s a natural filter indeed. And a good one at that. Keep the short attention spanners who need tiktok level ease of use on reddit.

Have you tried piefed.social ? Compatible with Lemmy (allows you to import your subscriptions list actually) and with a different approach: join.piefed.social/blog/

Cool for you to do a presentation. Feel free to share how it went here afterwards!

We need more users for those small spaces to grow, one of the reasons I still use Reddit alongside Lemmy is that there is no ‘South African’ community on here, there is a very alive and fun South African community on reddit, that alone will make me keep using Reddit.

I’m sure that’s true for many other niche communities, for those to take hold in Lemmy we need numbers.

I wasn’t gonna say anything but that’s another issue with the userbase on Lemmy.

It’s occupied by a lot of people who think they are better and smarter than everyone else. Not that reddit didn’t also have that problem but the smugness levels are definitely way higher around these parts.

@AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee

Unfortunately, Sync for Lemmy is basically dead. Hasn’t been updated in nearly a year. I’m currently looking for a good alternative

Well I do like new Reddit. It has a dark mode and works well with different screen/window sizes. Sadly it’s slow and equires JS to load the content (makes it slow).

Imo Lemmy web is most of the good parts of old Reddit and some of good parts of new Reddit. Though it’s not the best UI. My favorite UI for Reddit is Redlib [1]. It’s fast, works well on desktop and mobile, and looks great imo.

[1] github.com/redlib-org/redlib

I like new reddit. It works well, I just wish I could keep it the same as it is. I HATE Lemmy desktop UI and nearly went back to Reddit because of it. Voyager for mobile and photon for desktop. Honestly photon for both might be better but I’m apparently the 1% of people on Lemmy that actually prefer an app over a website 🤷‍♀️

I read a really good article recently about how people from different generations process information differently and so their UI preferences are wildly different.

The gist of it was

• A Boomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books. There are too many ads for books, so they tune them all out. They choose one by an author they know, that their friends said was good.
• A Gen Xer / Millennial walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They check the various authors they like, check that the cover art is appealing and read the backs of the different books, figuring out which one they want to read, then they buy that one.
• A Zoomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books, and feel bombarded by the ads for books. They check the authors the influencers they subscribe to on Youtube and Tik Tok say are good. They grab one of those based on the color of the cover, ignore the back and the cover art, flip it open to a random page, read that page and if what they read grabs their their attention they buy that book, but if it doesn’t, they move on.

As a result, each of these people will prefer to interact with vastly different UX.

Of course these aren’t hard and fast rules, set in stone and there are tons of exceptions, but it’s a definite trend.

The Lemmy demographic skews hard to the older Millennial / Gen X demographic and is mostly people who were on reddit 15+ years ago. It’s UI appeals to those people.

@AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee

This 100%. And there are other former-reddit-3rd party apps as well afaik

Same…though it seems to do some weird stuff like not marking DMs read, or not having an easy way to embed a photo that’s already hosted somewhere (and my instance seems a bit conservative with size limits).

Still, it’s a solid app, and the only way I interacted with reddit.

For the android users : play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenma…

Edit: ohhh, this may be better than Sync…

Voyager for iOS feels just like Alien Blue/Apollo

Yea but imo that’s part of the problem. I use sync because it makes it easy, but I’ve tried to figure out how to access lemmy on desktop and it’s non-trivial (I still haven’t bothered to figure it out, I’ve given up multiple times)

!boostforlemmy@lemmy.world gang

Thanks for the tip Photon is great!

I use it with Alexandrite as well. Those alternative clients really made a difference in my experience on desktop.

This I like, it solved many of the issues. I wish it was the default.

something in the same direction can be found under blorpblorp.xyz

Thanks so much! I was using m.lemmy.world, and while it improves most things I struggle with a touch interface on a desktop. Your recommendation is great!

Edit: It seems this has a few teething issues. I’ll see if I can describe them well enough to provide bug reports for. It would be great if this worked well enough for the average user.

.

The reality is this filters out all non tech savvy people.

Well ot kinda was true for the time of the big reddit exodus, there were very active and massively upvoted threads about one instance defederating from another, instances debating on whether they should defederate, beehive publicly wondering whether to ditch lemmy etc

I’m so sick of this dumb ass argument…

The server question was 100% the reason I didn’t join Lemmy right away. It’s not that I didn’t understand what a server is. It’s that the signup form was asking me to make a decision I didn’t know the answer to, so I gave up.

With a little more hand holding, I’d have joined months before I actually did.

Regardless if it was the plan, it’s the result.

I can’t stand what it has become, especially when some of the most problematic subs have massive influence over the rest of the site, like wsb.

I have a post early on Lemmy, around the migration, about how it felt like any morality and responsibility to objective fact over there left with our initially migrating group. The change is subtle, but it’s crazy how far you have to scroll into the comments now to find the buried correct answer that refutes the misinformation in the title or linked article.

Also, the “which movie is this for you?” Type posts have just saturated over there. As well as shit, obscure linked sources (e g. “Indiatrump.biz” “realzgovtruth.info” kind of shit), as sources of front page upvoted posts, seem so much more prevalent over there now.

makes me think of people who say they don’t like tofu. (tofu is a protein sponge that tastes like whatever you soak/cook it in)

That’s a big reason I liked Lemmy.

Lemmy desperately needs to get rid of toxicity of this kind.

It has become a more hostile place, and this negatively affects the experience for everyone, including the OGs.

And yes, if you want to have more lively conversations, you need more people. If you need more people, you should stop calling them morons and help them figure it out in baby steps. Don’t make it harder than it already is.

Isn’t that just NodeBB?

Voting being disabled is an option built into Lemmy that the admins can activate, though only a few choose to. I know Blahaj disabled down votes but not upvotes.

Also I can’t test this immediately, but at least on reddit, if you highlighted text from someone’s comment before hitting the reply button, it would automatically put that in quotes in your comment box.

I think all of that would be easy to add to Lemmy, they already have the sorting method for posts (New Comments), the option to sort comments as “Chat”, and the option to disable voting. Maybe file a few feature requests on the Lemmy GitHub. It would be interesting to see an instance like this.

To access it on desktop, just open the browser and type your server’s URL (in your case, lemmy.world). It’s not some special protocol, it’s a regular site.

I guess we have inevitably reached the “apps for everything” point, after which people become uncomfortable just typing something into the browser.

Cross-platform desktop Lemmy app, anyone?

There is a reason such a large part of Lemmy is developers. There’s no confusion signing up for the developers. Federations and servers and instances are all crazy jargon to regular people. Although we may not want all regular types here, having some more regular people to balance out all the high IQ techies could make things more fun.

Create username and password Sign into preferred app from your favorite store.

I liked old reddit, and Baconreader, so for me Jerboa was great

This exactly. Once I dove in and stopped reading, it oddly made more sense to me.

I like my instantce

The problem is, and was for me too - that’s not how people think of email. Saying “pick a server” is really arcane for most people, even “pick a domain.” The fediverse as a whole has a terminology and jargon problem it still hasn’t completely reckoned with, or at least figured out.

JUST LIKE EMAIL YOU NITWIT!

We have very different perceptions of how people approach emails.

Guess how tech illiterates(?) approach email? They sign up on Gmail - perhaps with some handholding - and that’s it. That’s all they know or care about.

And before you say they don’t deserve to be on the internet: they are all using Facebook, Youtube, Whatsapp, etc. Unless platforms like Lemmy actually treat new users better, there’s not much incentive for people to switch.

This is a good point. And also reddit is astroturfing hardcore, it’s likely that many comments are coming from botted accounts and especially upvotes are heavily manipulated.

I’m not disagreeing with the fact that a lot of people genuinely struggle to get started on Lemmy. But just pointing out that perception is actively amplified on reddit, because they obviously want to discourage people from joining Lemmy.

It’s not a conspiracy at all, I’ve seen countless positive comments and posts about Lemmy removed over the past year or so. They know about us and they are worried.

👏👏👏 Very well said!

What’s a good way to explain it then?

True but they've improved dramatically - especially what Blaze is telling people now in r/RedditAlternatives. (it's sth like 5 sentences now, only what they need to know - see it live here)

None of them really explained the user experience, and how different instances might affect it, let alone the existence of the local and global feeds and how your instance choice affects those

I almost never use the local feeds. Technically my instance choice does affect them, but I could switch to any other random Lemmy instance and the experience would be 99.99% the same for me.

To me it’s not forks vs. chopsticks, it’s someone looking at a fork with 3 tines instead of 4 and getting paralyzed not being able to decide between the two.

Somebody will have to host that. Whether it’s a Lemmy app developer, or baked into the Lemmy codebase itself.

The lemmy servers could also provide how much headroom they have for extra users and the selection wouldn be weighed based on that so that smaller servers wont be overloaded and larger servers get enough users. They could implement some of this into the lemmy api itself.

The problem with that is there is no centralized website you go to for Lemmy. The closest thing to that would be the various apps you use for Lemmy so my question would be where would you put this quiz? I think when people talk about joining a server being hard it’s just hard for people used to a centralized social media to get used to the idea that one social media platform can be made up of a bunch of different websites and it becomes overwhelming to even figure out where to go. They’re very used to just going to reddit’s website so if they can’t just look up Lemmy and click the first link to join it’s gonna be too complex.

“…especially when they have average intelligence.”

People with average experience struggle with the new paradigm. Nothing to do with intelligence and that kind of elitism is the reason I first bailed on lemmy.ml. I would have thought that someone with average intelligence would recognise how many of the worlds problems today stem from people punching down.

Sorry, that’s more than one sentence.

person you’re saying that to: “So much words, very explaining!” runs away

This is basically the solution. Just give a few words to explain that different servers can have some rules differences and offer the easy join button.

Get people onboarded fast and easy! If they want to, they can learn more afterwards.

Are there endless wars? A lot of people don’t like .ml, lemmygrad, and hexbear and they’re defederated by a lot of instances, but that’s not really a hot war. Outside of that most drama seems to be about certain mod/admin decisions. But that kind of feedback loop is by design. People are supposed to have opinions on whether they think instances are well run and aligns with what they’re looking for…and if it doesn’t align, that would be a good reason to switch instances. I see more fretting over how to make Lemmy more popular than arguments about instances.

I’m fine with that while it lasts. Having millions of active users would increase the feed, but it’s not going to increase the likelihood of me talking to anyone smart

I use Stealth with the express intent of not contributing to Reddit (there are no ads on Stealth) while consuming their server’s resources. It’s a sort of protest in its own way. Especially since those niche interest subs are the only way I could quickly get information about the community without having to scroll through discord servers— hell, in Lemmy-Kbin most of them are run by bots reposting from Reddit, and there is no way I can manage or advertise my own magazine, what with my busy schedule in my university.

That’s a cool idea

I do like the idea of a map.

We have colonized the Internet it’s probably about time we start making a map for those that follow.

That’s a pretty funny thing to say when talking about a platform explicitly designed to fill the same niche as reddit.

The call is coming from inside the house!

Although now I see some comments from people saying there’s something wrong with lemmy.world.)

• No VPN
• older version of Lemmy (doesn’t allow to remove uploads tech.michaelaltfield.net/…/lemmy-fediverse-gdpr/)
• debatable policies (see the last one about “allow flat earthers” !lemmyworld@lemmy.world )
• federated with Threads
• some power tripping !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com

“You can access all content from the Lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which you choose” 1. not strictly true and 2. if it doesn’t matter why make the choice?

This is a great point. If it doesn’t matter, why not randomly assign you to an instance? The reality is that it does because some instances are political, and some federate with other instances that could give a negative impression of Lemmy. By people recommending particular instances to sign up to, shows that there’s an element of calculation as to which instance to pick.

Onto your second point, your impact would be negligible. I wouldn’t worry about that scenario.

I guess even though you would be reducing their costs, in the spirit of the fediverse getting back to the internet’s roots, changing your instance based on the communities you interact with would kind of be like moving to a new email account host because most of the people you email are using it, which isn’t really a good or bad reason so much as a personal decision based on what you value.

Would I be decreasing people’s operating costs if I just opened an account on example.lol so most of my interaction was on my home instance?

Likely no. If one person on the instance is subscribed to a remote community, everything is synchronized anyways. If no one is subscribed to the remote community then it’s probably a very small and low activity community anyways, which means it’s a drop in the bucket difference.

Technical aptitude != emotional maturity

This is what we call “dipshit energy”.

The fediverse is confusing and that’s bad. It should be less confusing, and there should be less people making comments like that one. Quit it.

We’ll get there sooner or later. Hopefully sooner.

I would love info/data-sheets about all the instances, that would make the decision process easier:

• who de-federated who?
• who hosts most content related to topic X?
• number of users and their distribution of joined communities
• posts/second average user activity …

Nothing to do with TikTok or this generation. Most users find it complicated and insulting them won’t change reality. I’ve learned that the hard way from my years trying to convert people to Linux.

What Lemmy and Mastodon need to do is to have one canonical instance that they manage well themselves. Everyone gets signed up to that initially and those who want to transfer to another instance afterwards can. That alone could have prevented BlueSky taking the lead the way it did.

.

Picking a starter is easy. Everyone knows that pokémon is a game about collecting creatures, and everyone knows what fire/ water/ grass is, so no one’s gonna be stumped. Not everyone is gonna immediately know what an instance is, or what it does, or what it’s there for

I suggested it to a few ppl and even offered to show them how to use it but they said it’s “too hard to understand” sad times we live in.

This is how I ended up on a German server. I don’t speak German but really isn’t an issue. Just pick one.

While I agree in general, there is a bit more as unlike email… Defederation is a thing.

People always use the email comparison but it’s really not the same, it’s more complicated than that. We know it’s not too much of a big deal but it is when you don’t know what it means to be on a server.

I remember being presented with a choice of servers myself and wondering what on earth it meant, and just wanting to join the “default” one. Ultimately it doesn’t matter too much but at the time it feels like a big hurdle.

…it would be if in your analogy GMail blocks Yahoo because they don’t like the politics of their CEO, Outlook blocks both GMail and Yahoo to create a safe space, and you left Protonmail out of the list entirely because almost everyone else is blocking them for not banning users who email the wrong kind of porn to each other.

It’s not a big deal until you realize the notion that they all talk to each other is mostly a lie and all the big ones block dozens of instances each. Hell, the threads on the larger instances about whether or not Threads and Truth Social should be defederated if they ever enable federation were some of the highest activity topics on Lemmy for a bit. So was people cheering about Burggit shutting down their lemmy server.

Two minutes (and you’re being very optimistic here, for someone who isn’t technically inclined it’s almost certainly going to be more) of required reading on a subject that’s just not even remotely interesting to 99% of people eliminates basically all non technical people. Because they just don’t care enough to devote that time. If that’s the user base you want, that works out, but I’d like people here who can hold a conversation about something other than Linux and Star Trek. It’s honestly kinda boring here.

It’s been a while since I’ve been on Lemmy, so correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Voyager, which I’m using right now, pretty good? You also don’t have to install an app, just set it as a Browser app on Firefox and you’re good to go, even though the apps on the Google Play store are pretty good.

Idk why anyones upset about ppl who prefer new reddit not wanting to be here, exact type of person who should stay there

In their defense, the reddit UI did suck and the webpage was barely functional for a very, very long time. How many years did it take them to get video to be even passably functional?

Almost every Lemmy interface is an order of magnitude better than anything reddit has ever managed to produce. Voyager is a pleasure imo.

That would help if they had a clue which one was near them.

Default to “nearest” one?

Agreed, to a certain extent. The internet was a much better place when it took at least a little effort and knowledge to join in and participate. Barriers can be a good thing.

I know this might hurt to read but the average reddit user probably is someone who doesn’t know how email works.

it’s confusing from the perspective of choice paralysis, ultimately you can just make a new account and move to another instance if you really don’t like the one you’re on.

Unless something has changed, migrating your account is more like copy/pasting config on a new account. Your post history etc however does not come with it. If that’s something that matters to you then picking the “right” server matters a little bit.

For example lemmy.world has defederated from a bunch of instances (lemmy.world/instances) Creating your account there means you’re missing some of the full experience of Lemmy, for better or for worse. A smaller instance may federate more content, but may run slower or worst case stop working entirely if the admin abandons it.

I just used a handful of different servers over the course of a few weeks to see which was my ideal server.

@AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee

programming.dev/post/25153462

Yepp

I mean, I lost all my old posts (or at least access to them) when two instances I was on just poof'd.

The majority wants better UX (look at up vote ratio of comments)

A fair amount of users want to gatekeep lemmy to only tech savvy people.

BeCaUsE fUcK dUmB NoRmIeS WhO CaNt FiGuRe It OuT, iTs JuSt LiKe EmAiL

There’s a lot of us who just want better on boarding and defaults, it’s not a lot to ask.

The UX is objectively bad, it breaks most good design principles

Half the fun of lemmy is all the frontends, apps, and customization options in general sprinkeld about

oh shit that’s awesome almost makes me want to not use sync anymore

almost

I miss those times when you actually had to learn a lot of things before being able to write stuff on the internet.

The problem is that mainstream media has less integrity now than it did 30 years ago. The national broadcaster in Australia for example has been infiltrated by right wing people (BTW I don’t want to get rid of ABC, just wish it was better). To cut through the propaganda, people need to acquire the skills to find their own media sources. Unfortunately that also means getting technical ability with computers now. Best thing I can think of is helping less adept people to navigate the space. Otherwise we end up with a much weaker democracy. Listening to C-SPAN callers in 2022-2024 scared the hell out of me and made me think Trump was gonna get voted back in. People stuck in legacy media space are getting brainwashed. I wish it was easier to curate RSS feeds for non-technical friends and family.

Oh, cool, a new account to block.

Literally in this thread is another person calling it too left and another calling it too right.
You notice the things you don’t like more. Political ideology is always going to have a spread the problem is the argumentative user base and user self superiority.

Likewise, lol. A little friction keeps the chaff out.

same here, eternal september growth be damned

It doesn’t keep dumb people out, it keeps non tech savvy people out, I’ve seen extremely immature people on here

I’d pick a mature user over a tech savvy user any day. Ideally they’d be both

Although, I think the answer to the barrier to entry is to be less concerned with making federated services feel like centralized apps, more concerned with rebranding server select as the advantage that it actually is. Educate those people.

So Lemmy is filtering out people who can’t take 5 minutes to understand a simple concept and make a decision?

Is there even a point to which one you pick? I just picked .kbin because I liked the UI, and when that fell apart I moved to .world mostly at random.

Is there really a large difference between them?

Unfortunately yes. And there is no going back.

These people must have been paralyzed with fear when they had to choose an email provider.

In the U.S.? Yes, absolutely.

The problem is that in order to become a proper reddit replacement Lemmy needs enough users to create niche communities.

There are plenty of active communities related to technology and politics but there is no equivalent to r/batmanarkham or r/letgirlshavefun.

Plus there are plenty of communities that are all but abandoned. We need more people to actually be a proper forum.

I agree with you, but at the same time if there aren’t enough users, small and niche sublemmys will never grow and have enough content to be interesting.

Exactly, I feel the mindset of ‘line must go up or you die’ is really ingrained in people’s minds. Even if everyone leaves for something else lemmy will still be here, slowly getting better with updates and time.

Doesn’t matter how many people use it. As long as even 1 person wants to use lemmy it will be here…

Feddit.org and lemmy.ca are also non profits

Is there any way to set one up that protects the anonymity of the people involved (where even the organizers don’t know each other’s real names) for opsec purposes?

I don’t think partisan is even the right word here as many Lemmy users are too far left for mainstream political parties. In fact I am further left than most any mainstream party, but am still considered a capitalist shill by people here.

The political leaning is definitely unfortunate. The fediverse should be for everyone, not just a certain political section.

So you, a normal person, join and instantly when a meme or comment allude to being altruistic, you leave? It’s so unfathomable to me how this is probably true. So many people need the world to be egomaniac or they get uncomfortable. Maybe they’re the problem though

Um… okay, if the fairly mainstream for our demographic politics here repels certain people, good.

I’ve suggested something similar before and got shur down. Just sort people into a Lemmy server either based off their interests or location

“Nationality France = Lemmy France Server”

Or

“What are your interests? Gaming = Gaming Lemmy server”

simply spin the wheel

That’s how the Lemmy info page (what comes up when you search for “Lemmy”) does it, and the experience isn’t great.

Before I knew how Lemmy worked I just clicked the first option it showed, which (for me) was a non-English instance. The second option was that LGBT-focused instance that defederated with lemmy.world a few months ago. Of course I didn’t know anything about either community so I just picked randomly. I went right back to Reddit until they pulled the next anti-user thing.

right wing?

Political literacy classes are available online… the idea of anybody thinking Lemmy is right wing (whether it’s code or the majority of its user base) is hilarious and a bit sad at the same time.

What’s most annoying is that for 95% of users, federation doesn’t even matter. You just log on and use lemmy exactly like reddit. All feds are consolidated onto my front page anyway.

People make a big deal about it, it definitely intimidated me when I first logged up. It’s one of the reasons I put off getting into lemmy for such a long time, and it’s frustrating that in the end, it really makes no difference.

Maybe I’m more tech oriented than many, but I don’t find federation confusing at all. I’ve never understood why it’s described that way.

“Extremely” confusing?

Maybe to someone who has never once used email. But, even then, you could say “It’s like choosing a car, some look different, but they can all use the same roads.” If someone has never used a car, you could say “It’s like choosing a brand of underwear”. If they don’t use underwear, do we really want them here?

I don’t think anti-tankies can be blamed when said tankies regularly engage in brigading of other instances. Like is everyone actually behaved this wouldn’t have been an issue.

Well the concept of email is much more popular than the concept of a reddit style platform or even social media entirely. So information spread more easily. And nowadays people just sign up for the account “required” by the OS of their phone which mostly comes with an email address.

I picked the wrong one when I was a kid. I barely know why I picked the instance I did. It is hard to pick one. I say when trying to join lemmy, there should be interests tags that you select and an instance is populated for you.

Pick the one everyone else is using. Your friend has a Hotmail? You make a Hotmail. Everyone switched to Gmail? You’ll also switch to Gmail. Also for a lot of people, email is just email. They don’t even know that you can choose a different provider.

You’d get an email address from your ISP. Early on you’d just dial the ISP, send/receive email, and then automatically hang up. College freshmen were assigned a school email address.

Eventually, “web mail” became popular because you could log in from any computer, like at the library.

By the time email became unavoidable, everyone had already been assigned at least one email address. It was seen as a major feature of the internet itself.

They didn’t, they signed up for gmail.

I consider myself an idiot when it comes to this, but even I had zero issues. Went to Lemmy, joined .zip because it sounded cool and started browsing All to discover other communities (same as Reddit). If it had more steps to that then I would’ve done that too because i acknowledge that Reddit is going to shit and I am committed to my principles.

It’s not minescule. I remember actually taking days because I don’t understand where and how to. You’re a good person I can tell so stop being elitist as fuck it’s childlike

Eh, I kinda get it. I think there should be a default instance with curated feeds coming auto-subscribed into.

I don’t remember if this is the case since I signed up almost a year ago, and I use on the phone exclusively with Voyager

You don’t even have to sign up to view posts or comments.

I mean, there’s already apps that are good that were created by reddit app developers. E.g. Boost for Lemmy. The problem isn’t the apps, it’s the availability of content and people. The /r/orioles on reddit has 85,163 subscribers. 110 people on the page right now. /c/Baltimore_Orioles here has 150 subscribers and no posts in 4 months which was a bot posted game thread with 0 comments on it. The problem is meaningful content and people to interact with, not the UI. There’s no reason to join if you want to talk sports because there’s no on to talk sports with. I’m not going to sit in game threads by myself and post my thoughts to no one.

Good luck & we’ll be waiting

Pot, meet kettle.

Yeah, people actively surrounding one water cooler aren’t likely to go across the room to a different water cooler with no one there to start a new community. There’s a lot of mental and social effort required there.

In the news in tech communities the moderation was becoming oppressive. If someone pisses all over the water cooler, then people are a lot more likely to change it up.

We see the same thing in the niche video gaming communities.

Well the only way to change that is to engage with those communities and provide content. Ofc. community building isnt easy.

In the early years fo Reddit, those wouldn’t exist either. You have to start with bigger groups (NFL, NHL, etc) and split them if they ever get big enough.

An improved version of old reddit with a good mobile view, which old reddit lacks.

Am used to New Reddit UX (2020-2022ish) but i still like this tbh.

Very inside baseball opinion. It’s like me describing reddit as “endless drama” because I read every thread on subreddit drama.

I’m certain those replies are in bad faith to discourage people from leaving reddit. The first one is obvious for your aforemention reason. The second one. I mean the internet has been around for decades. People haven’t suddenly forgot how to use it. Even normies have been able to figure out how to click a server. They’re fomenting lazy inertia.

The first year after the api debacle in 2023 was rife with culture class of redditors tromping through anarchist and communist communities and instances and freaking the fuck out they’re allowed to exist.

Those instances have resulted in defederations or there’s been enough fatigue and migration that these days its really just down to like 3 chronically obsessed users variously spamming about it.

I frequently see comments saying stuff like “don’t trust them, they’re from Lemmy.ml” or “I’m glad Hexbear defederated” usually in terms of tankies/pro-russia anti-Ukraine support. Or occasionally, a random dislike of Lemmy.world because it’s too much like Reddit (isn’t that the point?)

Because email federation is inherent to everyone’s understanding of how that service works. And perhaps more importantly, email “instances” are run by corporations. Laymen are not signing up on a “server” or “instance,” they’re signing up for Google, Apple, or Microsoft - the service they get aligns to a company that provides it. Nearly every single service that anyone has ever signed up for online has followed the same essential process: go to fixed url, create id and password, gain access.

It’s easy to underestimate, especially in communities like this, how enigmatic the entire infrastructure of the internet is to the general population. Think of those videos where people are asked what “the cloud” is: they pause and ponder and then guess “satellites?” because they’ve never even wondered about it. I’m guessing that for many people, something like Twitter is just something that lives in their app store that they can choose to “enable” on their phone by installing it.

People know that software is “made up of code,” but they don’t understand what that means. The idea that an “application” is a collection of services run by code, that there are app servers and web servers, that there are backends and frontends, is completely unknown to (I’d guess) a significant majority of people. And if someone doesn’t understand that, it’s honestly near impossible to understand what anything in the fediverse is.

And most importantly: this is not any user’s fault. IT and the Internet developed so quickly, and it was made so seamlessly accessible by corporations who at first just wanted their services to be adopted, and then wanted everything even more deliberately opaque so those users were more likely to feel locked in and dependent while the services themselves tail-spun in degradation.

We need more, and more accessible, and friendlier, tech literacy in general. The complexity of our world is running away from us (“I have a foreboding [of a time…] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues” - Carl Sagan) and we simply can’t deeply understand many of the things that directly impact us. But because of its ubiquity, IT may be the best chance people have of getting better at understanding.

Every other post is some worldist idiot whining about ml

While humanity can be incredible and beautiful to look at from a distance…
Humans, tend to fucking suck.

This post can be taken as-is with “Lemmy” replaced with “Linux”, and I fucking hate it. So many people despise the idea of “normies” coming to what they love as if they’re the reason things got so bad. This stuff could be so great if they were actually made for everyone.

I don’t want anyone staying on Reddit tbh

The question is: do we want people to leave corporate services, and join the fediverse, or not? By showing such hostility towards such “crybabies” we will never get any traction.

We are facing a problem. “Crybabies” are arguing about lack of content and/or difficulty on signing up. People on Lemmy are arguing that they don’t want such users in their communities. Other people, thinking of onboarding, may not join after seeing hostile users like you.

…and the fediverse doesn’t need to dominate all social media. Period.

You’ll never be able to migrate the IG influencer whose affiliate marketing business relies on the algorithm, or the Titkok million views dude who makes money off their views and lives. So I really don’t understand this argument of “Oh we’re alienating mass users”.

Just like there’s non-profit orgs vs businesses, open source software vs commerical ones, there also fediverse vs commercial social media. I prefer it here, and to each their own.

You’re confusing UX with UI. UX = user experience, the entire experience, UI = the interface. UX is the entire user experience, and for example for joining reddit, you go to reddit.com and join. For lemmy you learn there are dozens of large instances, with intricate politics between them and if you join the wrong one everyone thinks you’re a tankie…

That’s terrible and i can imagine people are put off by it.

The interface of lemmy itself is indeed ok, and is close to old reddit, which at least the people here prefer.

“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.”

Because for every choice presented, people want to know the consequences of each one before proceeding. It’s a well understood problem in sales and marketing. People do not want to put themselves in a position where they have to undo. Companies like Apple do this very well. In computer shops, the reason staff are hired is to help get the customer from “wanting a laptop” to “choosing one laptop”, rather than walk away feeling that they need to think about it more.

“Just look at a few of the most populated sites, and pick one that looks good. The choice makes 95% no difference in practice”.

Maybe if they said that on the signup page it would help. I think it would have helped me. But just because you have a sense of what “looks good” doesn’t mean the average person does. It’s the average person that I want to interact with on the internet.

Too many choices = analysis paralysis

Maybe this is a terrible thing to say, but I actually like that registering for federated sites requires a bit work.

IMO, the internet was more enjoyable when it was just full of us nerds 😅

I disagree. I just found a link to lemmy.world, with no idea of how lemmy worked, and I’m perfectly happy. To me it seems like people’s endless complaints about servers come down to personal issues.

Yes. Lemmy is not friendly for the “average” user. We could come up with a list of severs with pros and cons to them and then people would feel more comfortable. I came here the moment reddit killed the API and I was so confused. Federated anything meant nothing to me and I discovered lemmy.world so that’s just what I joined. LOL I still don’t know the difference between servers.

That’s what I send to people:

“Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

• discuss.online if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
• sopuli.xyz if you want a server located in the EU
• vger.app if you want an app

Feel free if you have any questions”

What research is needed?

UX experience

We should shorten that to UXX

The average person is going to have no idea what “federated” means. They’ll probably assume it has something to do with the federal gov.

You don’t need to research and choose a server, unless you have personal issues. I get the impression that some people are so polarized they feel like logging into the wrong server would put them on the Wrong Side and make them evil. Some also can’t let go of the corporate media mindset that says domination is necessary for survival, or even that a contest is necessary. I just enjoy the content and ignore the complaints about numbers. The concept of multiple servers might keep some people away if they think they need to understand it, but they really don’t.

The biggest advantage of federated social media is that there’s multiple servers. I know it can be a rough point for new users, but most people can just join whatever the largest server is and they’ll be perfectly fine. You need to pick a server because lemmy isn’t one website, and it shouldn’t be one website. People should be able to host an instance if they disagree with another one’s moderation/rules, and spreading the load across many servers helps to prevent large scale downtime when servers go down. All of these advantages can coexist with new users just being pointed to lemmy.world.

UI =/= UX, and UX is what the comment on the post was about

I use Eternity on android and it’s a fantastic and much cleaner feel than reddit.

Yes it is

Base privacy rules of federation. The main difference in sign ups seems to be privacy policy. Or some filter on sign up that isn’t choose an instance but a filter that “finds you an instance.”

“Do you want to provide an email address?”

“Do you want x, y, z?”

Filter down to a single instance or if multiple just randomize what instance you toss them to. Just don’t make it a decision. When they are finished signing up send them a note that’s says “you can always change instances by going to _____ link or something to make account or change instances ____”

It’s really not complex but it’s the “feel” of complexity. For instance I froze a bit because some instances had no privacy policy, some said oh yeah we spy on you, some said no email needed just sign up… just get rid of that deer in the headlights moment, or standard privacy rules for federation in the “main” group.

The average user will go to join Lemmy and abort, because they can’t grasp the idea that joining one server gets them into other servers. They worry about server selection, have analysis paralysis, and nope out. That’s why they’re asking for a bluesky reddit and not a mastodon reddit.

Normie’s want centralization because they don’t understand how else it can work and while some can learn and have it explained many will give up before giving it a chance.

The average user that will get to join-lemmy will GTFO.

The average user gets their Google account by opening their device and going step by step with nice animations.

Find a person that already has an apartment, bills, work, relationship and isn’t working in tech.

A. Ask him to join lemmy. Ask after a month if it happened (spoiler, it didn’t). B. Help him open an account, check after he month if he kept it.

The average user that will get to join-lemmy will GTFO.

The average user gets their Google account by opening their device and going step by step with nice animations.

Find a person that already has an apartment, bills, work, relationship and isn’t working in tech.

A. Ask him to join lemmy. Ask after a month if it happened (spoiler, it didn’t). B. Help him open an account, check after he month if he kept it.

Somehow most people figured out email. It’s like picking Gmail, Outlook, Proton, Mailbox, Yahoo. Doesn’t matter, pick the one you like, create as many accounts as you want, or make your own server if you want.

This isn’t a Fediverse or Lemmy problem, but is speaks volumes of how broken the Internet has become and how far we’ve fallen. 😔

The average user, me, will go to sign up, kinda briefly go to Wikipedia on fediverse, still not understand, and pick a random server, and then here I am trying to figure it out as I go

Bad choice, many new users specifically came here because of !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, which can’t be accessed from lemmy.world.

Or just go to vger.app, which defaults to lemm.ee but allows you to register and log in with a whole bunch of different instances.

Ah yes, the US is being run by a fascist pedophile and his 4 techbros of the apocalypse, but lets focus on the tankies because clearly they are the real problem haha.

• !communitypromo@lemmy.ca can help
• "Top Day / 12 hours/ 6 hours" works better than Hot
• "New comments " works better than Active

You’re right, but you’re also not seeing some of the great and diverse content on Lemmy. Obviously reddit has a fuckton more content. Network effect and all that, but my Lemmy feed is not as you describe. I’m subscribed to a bunch of Linux, FOSS, privacy, music, and other great communities. While I do see articles and screen caps when I browse the all feed, my curated feed is full of questions, discussions, new (to me) music and more.

It certainly takes some effort to curate a feed for yourself, but it can be done.

The less profitable we are, the less they’ll bother us.

This is why I like SomethingAwful forums too. Open since 1999 and an account costs $10. Just a little barrier to entry keeps out the worst people and trolls help fund the site by reregistering!

Part of me wants the fediverse to take over because the world needs open systems and not corporate outlets for ads and propaganda.

But this place is really fun how it is and I want to be selfish and keep the precious all for ourselves.

I think we have a lot of wiggle room between the two, fortunately. If we get 10x the users with the barriers to entry doing the same filtering as now, this place could really be hopping. But if we get 1000x the users and start doing Reddit numbers, who knows what it will be like.

Knowing humans, maybe there’s a critical mass at which Lemmy would fracture into multiple fediverse islands. But each could still be vastly larger than all of Lemmy right now.

I like this idea! I still don’t see how the more narrowly focussed servers would benefit me. I went with Lemmy.world because size matters in a forum, and the admins have been outstanding with reliability. The most likely reason for me to jump ship would be if that reliability fell.

That being said when I was new I had no idea what hexbear was or Lemmy.ml or whatever, and there’s only so much a description can do. I know the difference after reading many discussion threads

But I so would have jumped on Lemmy.nerds over Lemmy.jocks or Lemmy.preppies. Multiple servers with clearer sub-audiences may help a new user onboard easier. That being said, I realize I could just do that if I wanted to. I also realize that may just amplify the echo chamber effect. And I’ll stick around for the reliability and scale

!communitypromo@lemmy.ca

That problem will go away if we get more people to join lemmy by providing good smooth UX

I love this! Totally agree, and you know what? I don’t need to give you an “award” and enrich the site owners with unnecessary money waste. I hope it never changes too. Quality over quantity.

When the Orcs are raping elderly women and their sons. Then murdering them. They deserve the name. Just so you’re aware. There’s a reason they are called this. They earned it.

Your #4 seems inaccurate, unless you were just walking us through your changing perspective as you joined.

This place is very left leaning and I’m sure it’s loaded with people who happily call themselves socialists while shouting down the MLs/tankies.

The main difference afaik is that they support authoritarians.

I tried to join a community that was meant to migrate away from reddit, but found two duplicates. So I wasn’t sure which one was the correct one. Ultimately the migration failed, even though it was a software oriented community

Which community was it?

What are those?

limbrols

First there’s the obvious topic of defederation, which makes the “join one server, access all of them” an outright lie.

• lemmy.sdf.org/instances blocks one outdated Kbin instance
• lemmy.today/instances blocklist is empty

Still those two instances aren’t that popular

I’m of the opinion that federation should only prevent a community or instance from appearing in the all feed. I should still be able to subscribe to communities that my instance has defederated from.

How is a simple reasonable skirmish, a war ?

I believe the accusation is that the admins and moderators had a discord server that they were coordinating harassment campaigns from.

For real. I’ve seen people being dicks from every instance. I see far more .world peeps going into a frenzy because their world view was slightly critiqued than crazy tankie takes. Not saying those don’t happen, and fuck tankies, but there’s definitely more whining “fuck .ml” memes I see. It’s just jingoistic bullshit. This is the Internet, nothing you do here really matters. Get the fuck over yourselves.

We have a good looking UI try Summit or Thunder for Lemmy for app and phtn.app for Web

vger.app/settings/install ?

vger.app/settings/install

More federation is good, but lemmy had a defederation fiasco when everyone was paying attention.

People have enough of that IRL and want a truly global community.

I had no idea I wasn’t actually seeing the front page of everything

If I understand it correctly you want something like what Mastodon has, splitting “your stream” and “world stream”, being the second the default one. Am I right?

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

Isn’t that All?

You need to give people the photon link: photon.lemmy.world

Lemmy has multiple view options, photon is the one that looks the most/exactly like Reddit.

The other view options are; a.lemmy.world - Alexandrite UI photon.lemmy.world - Photon UI m.lemmy.world - Voyager mobile UI old.lemmy.world - A familiar UI

You can choose the light theme in your settings

Nowadays, !communitypromo@lemmy.ca has daily threads promoting active communities

Also what client where you using for that screenshot? Clients usually show instances after the communities name

“Lemmy has 47k monthly active users

• discuss.online if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
• sopuli.xyz if you want a server located in the EU
• vger.app if you want an app

Feel free if you have any questions”

Pinned post on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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.