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?
Why is “drama” on Lemmy always highly exaggerated by people?
“Endless wars of who federates with who”. What is that person even talking about and who the fuck would even care as a normal user?
Who volunteers to fix it?
Leave the micropenis guys alone, it’s already a shit card to be dealt.
Nothing, this seems like a good thing, I don’t want them here if they literally cannot even comprehend the concept of different servers, though somehow no one has this issue with discord even though it’s dogshit, almost as if they just yearn for the corporate boot.
OP, FYI I pinged you on this post but it was probably drown in the replies to your posts: https://lemm.ee/post/55244676
If you want to try out your approach (Photon as default, probably some communities hidden from the All feed), feel free to create a community dedicated to that project. You can probably promote it here and on a few other communities. The biggest challenge is probably going to find an admin wanting to give this a try.
I wanted to do something similar a months ago ( https://lemm.ee/post/52588852 ), but no admin was interested. Maybe you’ll have more luck.
Thank you I appreciate all the input, I won’t have the time or energy to drive something like that. I can get behind a cause like that and help push it, but won’t be able to lead.
I’d love a place where there is no politics, it might also be appealing to many and I think it should be the default.
Then you probably hit the main issue. Everyone’s time is limited.
There are aspects that could be better, sure. I think communities should be like sets of posts, subject to unions, conjuctions, and other set operations. Then you wouldnt have the issue of 5 versions of c/memes, they could be virtually joined into one memes community at the user level (and the user can filter out instances icon unities risers they don’t like of course). Moderation could be decoupled from communities and made a broader service that users choose to interact with, agreeing to a level of moderation comfortable for their experience.
But also, put me in the group that thinks lemmy should stay small. Corpo social has convinced us that a single big room with every idiot and literally their mother screaming into it is how the internet should be and it isn’t. We can go back to smaller, focused online communities that don’t openly invite everyone to come in and fight.
Centralization tendencies are all rooted in power and control. We need to fragment more.
The fediverse being “endless wars about who is federated” is not really true, is it?
Sure not everyone is federated with everyone else, but legacy social media is federated with nobody at all. Federation is the entire point of the Fediverse, you connect with people you want to connect with and you don’t connect with people you don’t. It’s as simple as that.
Plus, do people really want to be on a single platform with everyone else in the world? Because that’s a big part of what broke the internet in the first place…
99% of users are going to check out when you ask them what server to join.
I’m so sick of this dumb ass argument…
People who complain about “servers” need to tell me what they think “the internet” is. The existence of servers didn’t stop online video games, email or discord/slack from catching on with hundreds of millions of people, so why is it suddenly a problem when it comes to the Fediverse?
Onboarding obviously needs to be better, but I’m going to be totally honest honest here: I don’t think these are legitimate, actionable or useful critiques.
These are merely excuses from people who are addicted to legacy social media and who don’t give a shit that the internet is owned and controlled by a few rich corporations.
Someone advocating for bells and whistles will get eaten alive here. Too many people would rather read their feed on a git terminal. The pushback would be worse than the community drama!
Have tell new users just sign up on your instance. Make it less confusing by sending them to a specific website and not just telling them about the software.
I swear to God, there are so many tech people here that overthink it because they know details that the average user would not give a single fuck about.
You can’t do anything because these excuses are window dressing and not the core of the issue. The core of the issue is that 99% of people are incredibly unwilling to change their habits or spend five minutes to wrap their heads around how things work. If the question of which server to join is too much, this kind of space isn’t for you.
No, having a full time job or a family is not an excuse to not learn how computers or the internet or networks in general work. You’ve had a lifetime to learn and are willfully ignorant. If you just give up and run away the moment you have to apply two braincells to understand a new concept, your cognition is fucked.
Im personally fine with basic competence and tech literacy to be a natural gate keeping the unwashed morons out. Lemmy is growing at a fine pace without catering to the lowest common denominators.
IMHO, the UX is bad, but the user base is also repellant. It’s further left than Reddit so most people who jump in bounce right off. That’s going to be difficult to change organically. Especially because most users respond to this with “good.” So there’s definitely no appetite to appeal to a wider audience. I predict Lemmy will become increasingly ideologically partisan and isolated.
The second this hurdle is crossed we’ll need a new Lemmy
I don’t know, feddit.nl is pretty chill. I always see everything and barely anything objectable
Don’t over think it, the people who want to be here will be.
IMO if Lemmy had all the features that old.reddt had it would still be an objectivly worse UX experience. Federating reduces UX, that’s just a rule.
We should focus on making the onboarding process as simple as possible like enabling social login (inb4 insecure and not private: let people make their choices), and making it easier to move between instances and understand what instance you’re looking at.
