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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I disagree that this is a concern. If you are already exaggerating about federation wars, chances are you already tried lemmy and know a good bit about selecting instances. The average user will not care as much as you do.
The average user will go to join-lemmy site, will not care at all about the different instances and likely choose the biggest one or first one they see. None of them will think "oh no this one is involved in federation wars" because thats not something you find out before knowing some about the fediverse.
The average user will go to join Lemmy and abort, because they can't grasp the idea that joining one server gets them into other servers. They worry about server selection, have analysis paralysis, and nope out. That's why they're asking for a bluesky reddit and not a mastodon reddit.
Normie's want centralization because they don't understand how else it can work and while some can learn and have it explained many will give up before giving it a chance.
That's about how it worked for me when I first tried giving it a go about a year ago. Wasn't until today when I saw that Reddit post talking about paywalling some subs that I decided to give it another go.
In fact that post had a pretty decent write up of how to set up Lemmy and what it was. Probably the only reason I managed to kinda figure it out.
The average user, me, will go to sign up, kinda briefly go to Wikipedia on fediverse, still not understand, and pick a random server, and then here I am trying to figure it out as I go
Somehow most people figured out email. It's like picking Gmail, Outlook, Proton, Mailbox, Yahoo. Doesn't matter, pick the one you like, create as many accounts as you want, or make your own server if you want.
This isn't a Fediverse or Lemmy problem, but is speaks volumes of how broken the Internet has become and how far we've fallen. 😔
The average user that will get to join-lemmy will GTFO.
The average user gets their Google account by opening their device and going step by step with nice animations.
Find a person that already has an apartment, bills, work, relationship and isn't working in tech.
A. Ask him to join lemmy. Ask after a month if it happened (spoiler, it didn't). B. Help him open an account, check after he month if he kept it.
The average user that will get to join-lemmy will GTFO.
The average user gets their Google account by opening their device and going step by step with nice animations.
Find a person that already has an apartment, bills, work, relationship and isn't working in tech.
A. Ask him to join lemmy. Ask after a month if it happened (spoiler, it didn't). B. Help him open an account, check after he month if he kept it.