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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 biggest UX issues, in my opinion, is the process of choosing an instance and content discovery.
When you go to "join lemmy", rather than choosing a username, you're presented a big list of instances, and you have no idea what that means and what it means for your experience if you choose one. Even though in reality it doesn't really matter, just having the list paraylyses the user as it's not a process they're used to. Users are likely asking themselves:
Sometimes I think it would be best if we could have some kind of read-only instance people can create an account on and get stuck in first, then choose an instance to sign up to once they understand it. The instance would be locked down so they couldn't create any communities. So basically when they they're directed to join-lemmy and go to sign up, they create an account on that instance right away and get started.
On the discovery front, a potential idea would be to allow communities to have a specific category tags field. When a user signs up, the host instance could have a page that they're directed to (this would be controlled by the instance, so they wouldn't have to have it enabled) which lets the users pick some topics they're interested in and can then subscribe to the communities right away.
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.
But the crux is which one do you recommend? We don't want to send everyone to the same instance otherwise it'll end up becoming dominant (see Lemmy World).
Ideally we shouldn't need to go through this motion of trying to work out which instance to choose or recommend one for them, they should be able to do that themselves after getting their feet wet.
Being already established, you have a few advantages over the newbies. You know about how a few different instances federate and work, and you know whether or not you like your instance.
Recommend your instance. Or if you wouldn't, whether because it's niche or doesn't work well in general, recommend a generic instance, even if it is .world, because it will probably work and give a good experience.