This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Man. You just gave me an idea (which would matter if I wasn’t a complete idiot).
Instead of servers that all attempt to be a sort of clone of Reddit, servers could focus on content similar to the way subreddits work.
So you’d join any one of these servers and federate with other servers just like now, only content would be focused between servers.
Example:
This server is a games server. It has /c/games, /c/fallout, /c/vintagegaming, etc.
This server will focus on news and politics. It has /c/worldnews, /c/marketnews, etc.
Sure, it would still have the issue of being fractured, but it would narrow it down so much that it would be more appealing and easier to navigate.
It’s probably too late for that.
Ultimately, I’m happy with the fediverse. Algorithms aren’t dictating what I see. There’s no profit incentive that will lead to bad decisions, so when bad decisions are made, folks will talk about it and come to a solution.
I miss old Reddit, but it’s gone.
That’s what that Star Trek server did.
The problem with that is that you need to make a user on one of those servers. Do you make it on the politics one, or the games one? What happens 3 months later when you realize the server you picked on a whim is full of assholes and gets defederated?
Do you think an average user at that point would move their subscriptions to a new account or will they get annoyed at the concept?
And it's not like exporting your subs to a CSV file or something to then upload to your new account on your new instance will work. Different instances will have different communities, so it won't be a 1:1 transition.
I can definitely see the friction for new users if this happens.
We all know people are lazy, so if the friction proposed by Lemmy is more of a burden compared to the inconvenience proposed by Reddit or another social media platform, then people won't change.
It would be interesting if there could be some tool that proposes similar communities on the instance you're joining based on the communities you were subscribed to in your previous instance. Community federation could allow for that linked list that could be reverse searched and served to a user, precluded by uploading a CSV file of your previous communities so you don't have to keep track of individual users in a server somewhere (which is anti-privacy anyways, and Lemmy imho is pro-privacy).
Why would you? The communities are accessible from every federated instance
https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
My point is you have to pick SOME server to host your account. You are right that most communities are accessible from most servers, but that is where it becomes confusing for someone who just wants to look at memes for a specific fan base.
You can experience each server before making an account, you just can't post or subscribe. If someone is afraid of creating am account on an instance they may not like (which if I'm being honest is a slightly strange worry, as it costs nothing to sign up, and they can delete the account if they don't like it), they can spend as much time lurking without an account as they need.
I can’t speak for other people, but if lemmy.world were to shut down today I’d just pick another server.
I will admit, it was confusing and almost turned me off at first. I was very upset about the whole deal with third party apps on Reddit. My daughter gave me the whole email analogy and it cleared my hesitation to join Lemmy.
I don’t know how it is today, but I had to apply to join world when I first got on. It would be awesome if an app would sign a person up for, say, three different servers and sync settings between them. Something goes down, wouldn’t even notice.
Assholes ruin everything though and making it easier for bot accounts to exist would end badly.
I don’t know.
When I first got on here it was a mess. It didn’t work half the time and when it did no content was being generated. I stuck it out though and I’m glad I did.
I’m definitely not the right person to come up with any solutions.
Thats topics lol, piefed and mbin, right now I think only admins can make them but they let tou put multiple communtiies under a topic
https://lemmy.zip/
https://programming.dev/ is for programming
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/ hosts a lot of queer communities
I prefer [email protected] to the [email protected]
I think some servers do that? They definitely try to cater to niches.
It is definitely not too late for that.