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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In the EU there is some amount of data protection and privacy rights, so that matters to quite a few people. Commercial outfits handle those distinctions behind the scenes (eg, US users vs EU users get different amounts of privacy). On the fediverse, the user has to figure this out themselves.
Beyond that, I agree with everything you say. Some of the instances don't even have the name "Lemmy" in the domain or brand which makes it confusing. Or maybe they're not Lemmy but just ActivityPub compatible. I have no idea. You can also get unlucky picking a "bad" server. I first joined Kbin.social because it had the best UI at the time but man, it rarely worked and totally put me off.
Yes! I as well started my Lemmy journey on kbin first.
Back when the API changes were introduced in Reddit, everyone on Reddit kept about lemmy.
Then, in the comments you read stuff like "Lemmy are a bunch of tankies, kbin is better, yada yada"...
Great, now you're already torn between two sides, without even knowing about the basic concepts of how they both work.
You then go to one Lemmy server, and see how bad the UI is, then you check out kbin, and it feels nice.
Well, and the rest is history...
The whole process was a massive time and energy drain in the end with no benefit. I don't think anyone with a life would pursue something like this any further. I trialled-and-errored my way to Lemmy.world while I was out of work. Otherwise I'd still be on Reddit.