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?
It’s depressing how many top level comments or replies are about how people like that there is a technical barrier gatekeeping lemmy. Are yall actually leftists or do you just pretend to be while worshipping your own version of social hierarchy in which us nerds are on top?
Why is “drama” on Lemmy always highly exaggerated by people?
“Endless wars of who federates with who”. What is that person even talking about and who the fuck would even care as a normal user?
Been using Lemmy for a couple of years, not seen this once.
Also, the ux is pretty much the same as Reddit.
These people are just stakeholders in Reddit. They are afraid of change, or losing any rep they have. They sit on a pile of useless upvotes.
I think a lot of people that think the UX is different from reddit weren’t on reddit 14 years ago when it did look very similar to this.
I barely remember reddit on PC. Except for people trying to convince me bitcoin would be valuable - and me thinking they were foolish. I would have sold at $25, anyways.
The UX once you figure out what works for you in Lemmy is nice, the UX getting to that point is terrible, as many have said. Most will quit before getting to the good part.
99% of gamblers quit right before they win big /j
Yeah, the UX of alexandrite, Voyager or even the Voyager web app for PC are sublime. I don’t see any difference from reddit tbh.
Really? You never ran into the endless “…furthermore, .ml must be defederated” posts?
Cofigure swipes to hide posts and just swipe them out? Idk, it’s not hard.
Oh, sure, especially if it’s the same few users. It’s just mildly surprising to not even run into them.
You can say the same thing about reddit but people still bitch about it constantly.
Same vibe as Cato in the Roman Senate: ml delenda est
Also, the ux is pretty much the same as Reddit.
The default one is a bit minimal, but we have many Alternative UIs are as modern looking as new Reddit.
They also work much better while being modern looking. There’s a reason so many of us came over here when they got rid of third party apps, the new Reddit interface is… bad.
There are a few .world posters who make two to three posts a day about how much they hate lemmygrad hexbear and .ml.
Well that’s just a waste of time really.
you will probably stop seeing much of that if you block users that post a lot to fediverselore and meanwhileongrad. They’re like the /r/subredditdrama of lemmy
I’ve seen it a few times but it’s really easy to avoid tbh
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
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?
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 don’t think that’s what the person on Reddit is referring to, but judging people by their choice of instance is dumb.
I haven’t heard about any of that drama since the early days when things were still getting sorted out
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.
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.
they’re a group of early reddit refugees from when /r/chapotraphouse got banned on Reddit for celebrating John Brown and the death of slave owners. They set themselves up a few years before the mass migrations from the Reddit API debacle, and over time they cultivated a distinctly uncompromising (and at times inscrutable) culture that heavily moderates the slightest hint of Western chauvinism, transphobia, and anti-vegan sentiments.
However, they also despise what they consider the farcical nature of Reddit style civility, and combined with disabling downvotes to force people to vocalize their disagreements, they also have the tendency to dogpile on people that aren’t perceived to be acting in good faith.
The biggest conflict with other instances is their third-worldist oriented strain of Marxism-Leninism which has a more accepting view of “AES” (Actually Existing Socialism i.e. China, Cuba, USSR, etc) that leads them to conclusions that critically favor actions by non-socialist states (Russia, Sahel States, Yemen, etc) which undermine the United States/Western hegemony.
When they updated their code to be compatible with federation, their extremely active users clashed pretty hard with the more liberal tide of recent Reddit migrants so the generalist Lemmy instances decided to just defederate from them.
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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.
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
I’m an OG user and other than technical issues (most of which have been figured it by now) I prefered both the original redesign and the newest one (though I did like the previous one more, I think).
If you get used to the fact that it’s just a bit different it’s perfectly fine and actually looks better. Especially since it has dark mode.
I tried, but I like information density and the new UI is a horrible waste of space. I get why people like it and it’s way more modern, I’m saying loads of people who used reddit from the start will probably never get used to the new UI, mostly because of the customizability and open API.
Reddit didn’t have apps in the beginning, so we made them over the years perfecting the UI. I settled on baconreader with a compact view, but it and so many others died when the API was purged. I patched my app and can still use it to this day, but I don’t because fuck them.
Oh yeah absolutely the app purge is why I’m here. I absolutely despise their mobile app; but on desktop I don’t mind.
The information density isn’t that important to me on desktop since my screen is plenty large and scrolling (or collapsing) comments is easy.
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.
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.
Boost feels a lot like rif which I was using and which shutdown made me switch to lemmy.
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 liked it a few years ago but they made it worse every update til it became near unusable, I used the spot where the put answers to hold a community so I can browse multiple at once like tabs
How old are you?
Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it ‘wars’.
As for UX, there’s definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstance without explicitly subbing to them all or using lemmyverse.net.
But I don’t think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.
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.
Even if Lemmy was one big simple centralized server, that user would just come up with another reason they couldn’t switch.
“Oh, it’s too small, my niche communities aren’t there”
“The UI isn’t as nice”
“The mod tools aren’t as good”
Etc.
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.
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That’s fair I guess. I remember that. That was around the same time as well, so someone registered to say Beehaw or Hexbear during the Threads fediverse announcement period would probably get the idea that federation wars is all that’s going, at least if they stopped visiting Lemmy shortly thereafter.
Those went on and on and on and on for years though - it was only 3 months ago that Discuss.Online finally defederated from Lemmy.ml, making it the first top ranked instance that would be suitable to recommend to Redditors. And even then lemmy.ml still remains to bully and abuse the potential users with tankie BS (bOtH sIdEs SaMe don’t ya’know).
Also before those two started there was Lemmygrad and Exploding Heads, and others I cannot recall off the top of my head but they really do go back a ways - defederation fights is kinda Lemmy’s whole main entire deal. Sadly, I am not kidding: it’s a Nazi bar effect where you can’t convince people to join a bar that welcomes Alt-Right Nazis (although in this case it’s Alt-Left tankies), bc they are turned off by such.
It’s fine if we ignore what those users want btw, it’s just less so if we don’t acknowledge who we really are, and then wonder why nobody likes us - that kind of incel culture is not okay, at least not with me, and I will stand by that.
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.
I’m on three different instances and the sort by All-hot feed is nearly identical.
I’m not on Beehaw or Hexbear, but those instances make it pretty well known they block a lot of other instances.
Some instances have very different rules on them that would affect your experience. Like not allowing downvotes, for example. Blahaj users can’t see downvotes or downvote anything themselves.
Yeah, true. But that’s cool. Having choice like that is great!
But I suppose that’s the issue. Trying to keep signup simple to help drive user engagement. How much do you try to wrap someone’s head around such nuanced differences, and when do you say “just join me on my instance”?
PvP v. PvE seems like it would make s difference, probably? :-P
But yeah I get you: the list of varied options is too large, and worse yet opaque.
Fwiw Blaze most often just recommends 2-3 options to current Redditors, to KISS (Keep It SimpleS:-).
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.
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.
Was going to post this. They’re just burying their heads in the sand.
Lemmy’s onboarding is trash and so is the main UI. Get away from that and it’s actually great. BUT, most people used the Reddit app when Reddit still allowed 3rd party apps and access so you HAVE to appeal to the masses, no matter how dumb you think they are. Don’t complain about not having mass appeal if you don’t want mass appeal or listen to them and make the change they’re asking for.
This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s
Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
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…
“but it feels like old reddit”. My god, imagine actively preferring the new reddit UI. Let them keep their shiny jangling keys instead of coming over here and pestering the devs for a snoovatar feature or whatever nonsense.
The ‘maybe read for 2 minutes to figure it out’ miniscule barrier to entry is a feature not a bug.
Unless we fix the UX problems in Lemmy, a Bluesky-like alternative of reddit is going to pop up, and overtake Lemmy, like what happened with Mastadon
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
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.
We have a slight disadvantage in that regard yes, but I know we can get to a UX comparable to Bluesky and Reddit.
There just doesn’t seem to be much focus on it, I feel setting good defaults will solve most of these issues.
Lemmy is nice for me now, but it took a lot of effort finding the settings and UI that I like, people will give up long before that.
See, I just use Thunder client and the defaults are x1000 times better than the official reddit app.
What I don’t get is why not pretend it’s centralized and just recommend a server when you introduce someone to lemmy instead of trying to teach them?
Oh you want an alternative to Reddit, here, go to lemmy.ca since your Canadian.
This is my thought… Don’t hide it, really, more like toss a blanket over that part while people get settled. Most will stick with the defaults (whether a single default like lemmy.world or regional defaults like lemmy.ca), but they’ll get the option if that’s something they want to change later (I do wish there was a way to move instances rather than having to make a new account, that might also help improve adoption… “Just go with this one while you settle in and move when you know where you want to go”)
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)
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.
Unless we use one of those as the default UI, the problem isn’t solved, people will give up before knowing of their existence.
Tell it to the hosts.
You can literally just share phtn.app and say its how you use the threadiverse/lemmy, it doesnt need to be hosted on a site with the same lemmy instance you can login to any account through these frontends
Alexandrite is honestly great. Made the experience much better. Just wish I could have it open links in a separate tab.
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
I did this for a couples posts that popped up on redditalrs that werent lemmy, they were definitelty alread netuered and ready for ads, worse than reddit
I don’t get how people get hung on choosing a server when people have been chosing a starter Pokémon since 1998 without any major issues. And you get just about the “same” amount of practical info.
Really, what tiktok does to a generation…
Aren’t you guys sick of forced infinite growth in every aspect of our collective existence? The Fediverse is not shareholder owned, we don’t have to be slaves to The Red Line That Must Go Up. Reddit went to shit when it was aggresively mainstreamed, I don’t want it to happen to lemmy as well.
Reddit being popular is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy.
When you get right down to it: people don’t care that Reddit is selling their information, that the site itself is a piece of garbage, that running the site requires a bunch of no-life weirdos whose numbers will only increase going forward and whose power will likewise, or that the design actively encourages bots to the point of disincentivizing actual human beings from using it.
They want their memes, they want their news, they want their niche little interest subs and they want their porn. The simple fact is that lemmy is a smaller version of Reddit with fewer options and to the majority of people who don’t care about their data or the objectively dogshit running of the site, there is no reason to cross over to Lemmy.
Until Reddit takes a Musk-type turn into being totally unuseable, lemmy will only see a trickle of users who are burned by Reddit.
Using Boost for Lemmy and it’s almost like I never switched.
- Stop making blanket claims about instances you like or dislike, no matter how fair you feel they may be, and don’t fall for the bait of others doing it. This is just drama and is exhausting to read about.
- Instead of suggesting people “join Lemmy”, say things like “Join Lemmy at programming.dev” (or whatever instance you yourself are using). Sure, “but picking a server is hard” will always probably be a complaint, but leading with the one you personally use is the best way around it. If you’re on a hobby focused instance (like I am) then maybe suggest a generic instance to people outside of your hobby. Don’t be afraid to suggest lemmy.world. It’s better to suggest the biggest instance than endlessly debate about which one is the best to suggest.
I think a big problem is a lot of the explainers for new users, at least the ones that were around back when I first joined Mastodon, were or are absolute dog shit. They were all existential explanations rather than practical ones. I was trying to figure out which instance to join, and why one might be better for me than another, and every explainer I saw was basically a variation on, “iT’s JuSt LikE EmAiL. wHy Is tHaT hArD? sToP bEiNg So sTuPid, DuMmY.” 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. It was like asking someone how to use chopsticks and them telling you, “It’s easy. Just put food in your mouth with them. Works just like a fork.”
Technically true, but it omits some pretty crucial information.
Once you’re into it and have the lay of the land, it seems really simple in retrospect. But if you’re coming in cold with no idea how any of it works, and the only help you get is some dickhead shouting, “EmAiL! iT’s LiKe EmAiL!” then the learning curve seems a lot steeper than it actually is.
