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Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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The idea that one must commit, is the problem. At first, I signed up for 3 or 4 servers. It needs to be pointed out that no commitment is necessary.
So now you are telling a user to make 3 or 4 accounts at once
Not necessarily. That's just what I did.
The point is, they aren't making a permanent decision. They can switch or move at any time for any reason.
Yeah but you have to see it through the normal-user eyes, for them just creating a new account is a whole ordeal, then they see that ordeal makes them investigate the server before picking and then it turns out they picked wrong... For them that's that and they delete the app (never deleting the account, mind you), branding the whole lemmy experience under whatever server they picked first.
If there was some sort of... Quiz? That could help them pick... But a brutally honest one, since some instances have pretty extremists opinions, new users have to know what they are dealing with.
People like that weren't going to add meaningfully to any discussion either way, if they flake that easily they were planning on lurking and likely wouldn't have commited to using this app over reddit, I was one of them til I got perm banned. I definitely preferred reddit because I had karma, over decade old accound so I could post wherever and had "credibility" in my head lol. Almost joined mbin before I realized I don't want user karma anymore. I do like post and comment upvotes/downvotes
I could see merit to that argilument if the sign-ups process was kind've a pain, but honestly it's so easy to create an account on Lemmy it's hard to give that too much credence. Most servers just want a username and a password, and many don't even require an email to verify. If putting in a username and password somewhere else because they didn't like their first instance is too much for them, that's a pretty flighty user to begin with, and they would probably leave for a host of other reasons too.
Saying that, a better way to narrow down that initial choice of server would not go amiss, but ultimately people will need to understand that this is all run by volunteers and there may be more bumps than a corporate controlled platform, but the other advantages (if they appeal to this theoretical user) are worth it.
Even with a better server picking tool, and even if they pick a server they like the first time, it's possible that server has to shut down some day due to unforeseen circumstances, and that user will have to either accept that they have to create a new account somewhere, or decide that's not an ideal UX and never come back, which would be a shame, but impossible to prevent.
You tell that to a normal user (and I mean NORMAL) and they will lose any interests in making the effort of attempting to pick a server... I know it sounds far fetched, but that's my experience with normal users, unless they have someone willing to hold their hand at every moment and every change, all these things scare them, no matter how simple they seem for us.
As someone who has had to explain to longtime Linux users why and how some arcane aspect of package management isn't grok-able by the common user, I understand where you're coming from with that point.
However, while I do agree the overall experience could be more intuitive and easier, if the first concepts of federation and picking a server is too much for someone, I don't know if that is possible to overcome since it's fundamental to this whole citizen controlled media experiment. Hopefully at some point in the future it becomes more popular, and thus the concept becomes more understandable and less scary due to seeing others get on with it, just like email.
People like to commit, though. They want to commit. They want to make an account and be done. The ability for established users and communities to move around is a great feature that makes Lemmy superior to other sites, but it really needs to work on making new users feel comfortable enough to stay put when they're first figuring things out, because if a new user decides to leave, they're probably not switching instances, they're switching platforms.
Having the ability to export your account data (say to a CSV) might be useful for this reason.
If you want to move to a new instance, you can pack your bags and head out.
You can probably imagine how this won't be a 1:1 transition, however, because the new instance might not have the same communities as the old instance. I commented on another thread about how it would be cool if Lemmy took your communities list, looked at how those communities federate for instance (or just do a word search on the new instance with names of the communities of the old instance), and serve you suggested new communities to subscribe to.
And if you can export your data, then there's no need to store it in a centralized way to make these types of actions doable, which favors privacy.
Some apps kinda let you do this
That's a good point. May be true.
Was your experience different between those 3-4 servers or was it pretty much universally consistent?
One didn't allow down votes. Seemed like a good idea. I rarely down vote. But in practice, when I do it's for a reason. And I want the option.
Another went down for roughly a week. So that didn't work out.
Which is one reason I embraced Communick; a paid instance. Been here since.
Communick is a nice option. I have an account there too. Unfortunately many Lemmings are weirdly hostile to it being a paid service, so it hasn't gotten much traction.
I think having more small business type Lemmy servers would be a decent solution to the onboarding difficulties people are discussing in this thread. There's definitely a chunk of users who just need the security of having someone to contact if they are confused about something or something isn't working. And if they're paying for it then the provider has an incentive to give them customer support.
Like I genuinely hope you dont pay that much littlecreek (im same dude as other comment) has a 3.50 deal for 4 core 4gb ram on lowendtalk, more than enough to run lemmy for yourself
I pay 7$ monthly for 8 core 16gb ram littlecreek, yunohost for free, installed lemmy on it, works solid, use like 10% of the resources with friendica also on the server lol That site looks insanely expensive monthly.
First of all, 99% of people don't have the technical expertise to self host Lemmy, and that's who we are talking about in this thread.
Secondly, there are very significant benefits to using a well established server versus self hosting. The most obvious perk is having a built-in community to interact with and learn from.
But more importantly, more established servers will already be subscribed to many of the major communities, making the task of finding and browsing remote communities that much easier. Consider this:
Your local version of c/science_memes only has ~200 posts and 1.2k comments. Also, many of the older posts didn't seem to federate the comments or upvotes. This is because your server only recently subscribed to that community, and federation doesn't occur retroactively.
The sh.itjust.works version of the community has 3.9k posts and 94k comments, because we have been subscribed since the community started.
The main version actually has 3.92k posts and 99.6k comments. Most of the missing comments on the SJW version are likely from lemmygrad and hexbear users, who are defederated by SJW but not by mander.xyz. This is also another major consideration about self hosting vs. joining a larger server: defederations. Some people will see predetermined defederations as a pro while others will consider it a con (also depending on which servers are defederated). The main thing is that people have options that work for them.
Funnily enough, the communick version is majorly fucked up, not sure why that is.
At this point I'm just getting curious, so I checked the lemmy.myserv.one version as well, and it's got an impressive 3.84k posts and 98.2k comments.
Might as well try it for c/greentext as well.
So yeah, it's not quite as simple as you make it seem. Hopefully someday Lemmy will integrate the ability to federate communities retroactively as some kind of option. Because I think that was more of a design choice than anything, technically it should be possible to toggle a setting and get your instance to download all of the posts and comments from a remote community, even from before you subscribed.
And I feel like without having access to all of the old posts and comments that we have built up over the past couple years, content on Lemmy probably feels a lot more sparse for a new user. Personally, I have always enjoyed sorting by top posts of all time in various communities, both on reddit and now on Lemmy. Even if you've been subscribed to the community the whole time, you tend to miss out on some great posts if you only ever sort by new or hot.
@[email protected]
I'm only now seeing that you are the same user, so obviously you can just browse older communities from lemm.ee and be fine. But it's still useful information to know.
And btw, I luckily have a free lifetime subscription to the communick Lemmy server because they did a promotion back in the day. I do pay them to host my Matrix account though. My original Matrix account got killed when the admin randomly decided to shut down his server, so I figured I'd go with a paid option.
I won't divulge the price since they no longer offer individual packages, but it's quite reasonable. If you compare their current pricing to what people spend on streaming services like Netflix, I think it's more than fair. $29 yearly for Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale access? I'd buy that as a gift for someone in a heartbeat if it would get them to start using the fediverse.
I gave up on the technical expertise part, thats why I use yunohost lol, and I defintiely went overkill with the 8core16gb for two apps that only im using, yeah its an issue you dont grab old posts, it shouldnt take up too much memory for text at least considering wikipedia can be downloaded for 58gb uncompressed