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
926 points (91.9% liked)
Fediverse
30002 readers
1471 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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 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