Fediverse

Whether these are just lazy excuses or not, but let's be real for a moment.

Imagine someone, who's used to go to reddit.com, search for a reddit app in the app store, both of which have the same logo, design, etc... and use their username/password to login and browse the content.

almost every service, that people use for the last decades is based on this specific approach, except for emails. Even the TLD was always .com

Now imagine, how overwhelmed those people might feel, when you tell them "just come over to lemmy".

Lemmy, where? lemmy.com? Here's where you then start explaining the different instances, federation, etc..

the next question will be: where's the Lemmy app? Remember, the unified logo and design? well, good luck explaining that all lemmy apps are de facto third-party-apps.

Now, once they make it throug all of that, the next hurdle that will confuse the hell out of them are the communities scattered all across the instances.

Add a bell button and a whistle button.

I think instead of promoting a page where people have to choose a server, just send people to lemmy.world directly. We should probably just get people to sign up there at first and have the ability to migrate their accounts to other servers if they want to do that later.

Having to choose from multiple servers is asking people to choose between a bunch of options they know nothing about. Get people straight to looking at content and posting stuff as soon as possible, once they're more invested, and understand more about the different instances they can change servers if that's what they want to do.

But yeah writhing the code needed to make account migration seamless might be a lot of work so not sure if that will happen.

We could stop bullying .ml users for being .ml users. That's the only "war" I have seen here.

Fully agree with that, the bar is too to high usually unless you're being handheld through the process, realistically there should be an app like how blue sky is that doesn't give you any of the options because less options means easier setup. If they want to jump instances after that that would be considered an advanced function but they can choose to do so on their own accord.

Another issue I think is lack of actual awareness, like Bsky got media coverage, the everyday person still is like "the hells a lemmy"

I totally disagree.

I've decided this is good and want a Lemmy that is restricted to just the nerdiest of nerds. These little spaces are cool without all those horrible reddit users.

To the guy in here going "UX != UI!!!" Sure, but you can't design UX, especially for the unwashed masses. "Tried cutting toenails with lawnmower; severed foot. 0/10 bad user experience."

Lemmy has a "have our cake and eat it too" problem. It offers two mutually exclusive promises:

• Each instance is its own independent self-contained little Reddit with their own communities, culture, code of conduct etc. so that individuals can find a place that suits them or make one if none is available, and

• All the servers are part of one great big federated system where all users have access to content on all instances so it doesn't matter which instance you sign up for, you can access it all.

In practice, the former is more or less true, the latter really isn't.

First there's the obvious topic of defederation, which makes the "join one server, access all of them" an outright lie. On the one hand, I think everyone here will agree this platform requires defederation to function so that we can kick out instances like lolli.rape or whatever, which thank you admins and mods for dealing with. But what about Hexbear, or Truth Social (which as I understand it is running on Mastodon software). The only honest answer to "where do we draw that line?" is "somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there."

It is intellectually dishonest to say that Lemmy has this problem and Reddit doesn't. Post in r/mensrights and an automod bans you from r/twoxchromosomes. Do basically anything anywhere on the platform and get banned from r/conservative. They managed to implement "It's a different platform depending on who you are" on a monolithic service.

All that crap aside, the average user has a more limited perspective on the rest of the fediverse than his home instance. Often, the UI defaults to viewing only local posts, you have to tell it to give you a global feed. You can browse a list of your local communities, you can browse a list of global communities, you can't browse a list of communities on a given foreign instance. 'Show me everything on lemmy.sports' or indeed 'show me a list of communities on lemmy.nsfw.' You cannot create (or moderate?) communities on instances you aren't a member of. It is, if only slightly, easier to participate on your home instance than elsewhere.

Either your choice of server does matter, or it doesn't.

If it does matter, we shouldn't have so many general purpose instances, it should be lemmy.music and lemmy.art and lemmy.uk. Then newcomers are presented a meaningful choice. Are you mostly interested in discussions pertaining to your country? Your hobby? Your career? Sign up here to mostly participate in that, and no matter which you pick you can visit the rest of the Lemmyverse, too."

If it doesn't matter, then design it such that instances are entirely transparent to users; eliminate the possibility of [email protected] and [email protected] coexisting, and make all instances lemmy1.world lemmy2.world, issue credentials centrally and then just spread the load in the background.

I don't think you can have both at the same time.

The main reason why I still prefer Reddit, is content. Even though I am subscribed to similar subs/communities/magazines/whatever on Reddit/Lemmy, my Reddit home screen is filled with interesting content compared to Lemmy. And, I never had to ban/hide anything/anyone on Reddit.

Yep. I came, couldn't get into it, https://lemmy.world/post/1388830 and unfortunately went back to Reddit.

I don't think it's UI issue. I think it's a traffic issue.

People go to a social media site because it's where everyone else is.

But the nature of the federation is that you end up with silos of traffic, and those silos are too small to keep content flowing, which stifles community engagement and subsequently growth. For every 10 people that see a post, one will like it enough to vote on it. Out of those people, 1 in 10 will be engaged enough to actually post. If they post and get no response, they lose interest in re-posting.

The strength of Reddit was that it allowed everyone to talk about everything at once, and it became the de-facto hub of the internet for many folks. You go onto /r/all and you'd get the sense that the world is there, flowing past. You don't really get that on lemmy or mastodon servers unless you make an active effort to go and subscribe to things.

A solution to this is, actually, more federation. Many lemmy instances could band together by building a front page interface that combined all of the best posts across servers. This would improve the speed and flow of content dramatically. Think of it as alliance like the old web-rings of the early days of the internet, but in this situation, you're posting the content of all your allied federated servers, and they're posting yours. Thus, when someone goes to lemmy.world, they really see the whole world of lemmy, not just this one instance.

This would draw in new users more than any interface update, IMHO. It also would serve as a great place for them to start to discover what they want to subscribe to and participate in, providing a far wider choice than any one instance on its own can provide.

Bad UX isn't keeping most people away from Lemmy. Not being able to give up their addiction to Reddit is what's keeping them from Lemmy. There's a lot of people who will complain about the shitty things billionaires and tech companies and politicians do to them, but aren't willing to lift a finger to change things.

You're never going to bring those people to Lemmy unless Reddit shuts down and you develop an algorithm to spoon feed them whatever they want to feed their doomscrolling habit. Lemmy is better off without them.