In other places on around the web, (chiefly /r/RedditAlternatives) whenever Lemmy is brought up, invariably I see the exact same complaints from brand new accounts.
Lemmy is too complicated, it wont gain traction, can’t figure out how to use it, can’t log in, etc.
Now, I’m definitely more tech savvy than the average redditor, but I just don’t see the complaints. You can go to any Lemmy site, instantly start doomscrolling with a familiar UI, and sign up on all the instances I’ve tried has been frankly more simple than making a new reddit account. The only real complaint I have is the generally smaller volume of users and posts.
My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.
Ideally, the first link someone sees when googling Lemmy would be a global feed on a fairly generic instance, with a basic tagline akin to ‘front page of the internet.’ End users don’t need to care about the technical details, at least not until they’re interested in the platform.
So is this “Lemmy is too confusing” sentiment even real? And if not, what motive would there be to astroturf this?
If it is a real issue affecting would-be users, how can we address it?
I miss the days when reddit was full of tech-minded people (back when they had to compete with Digg). These days it’s full of normies, and normies tend to be fucking idiots. Just look at any YouTube comment section, which is filled with them.
I used to think I want as tech savvy as the average reddittor, then I saw this shit and made an account. It wasn’t super streamlined, but most definitely manageable if you’ve done anything more advanced than click a link in a verification email.
join-lemmy.org could show the posts from all, with a big join button at the top. The introduction page can be shown if somebody presses the join button.
I just tried to use Reddit with a new account. After spending about a week in it, I suddenly noticed that all my comments and postings received no upvotes or downvotes.
That’s right. I was shadowbanned, which is to say that some part of the Reddit system (AI?) decided that I need to be put into a cage that I don’t see, without telling me that it happened. Perhaps I was “evading a ban” or something. I don’t think I did anything to deserve it, and the reddit admins don’t answer to queries about it.
So yeah, Lemmy is infinite times better than Reddit.
yeah, the ui sucks ass if you dont use an app
Really? When I have posted comments on /r/RedditAlternatives about Lemmy being too complicated and that it won’t gain traction, I’ve been getting downvotes. Despite saying I use it.
Concepts like federation and instances are definitely part of the problem. Reddit is quite easy to understand. Make an account on the website (or not), go to /r/all or type in /r/whatever, and away you go. Lemmy is not that easy to understand. Many people that could be interested in Lemmy don’t have any idea what the different instances are or which they should use, so they just give up.
Lemmy doesn’t need to take off like reddit did, but those touting it as the next big thing are being very optimistic. The barrier to understanding is just too high.
People just install Voyager and use it just fine. Some of them don’t even know what instances they’re on
Just a reminder that Reddit was once difficult for people to understand.
To be honest though, I’m a bit disappointed by the other users here. The quality of comments is really poor, both idiotic and adversarial. I’m talking fox news comment section level.
That’s weird because people here are super fun and clever according to my experience. Of course the debates are seldom in-depth but it’s still interesting and eye-opening for the most part.
I would love to create a group chat to analyze right-wing rhetoric, underline its hollowness passed the racism and ethnocentrism and generally talk about books that are interesting. Social emulation to go further in political science as a passion ! I need to make that group someday
Just a reminder that Reddit was once difficult for people to understand.
I honestly don’t believe this at all.
Snapshat was popularized by a generation that grew up only using apps, and it was designed to be obtuse, mysterious and difficult to learn in comparison to other apps as a feature. It grew regardless.
To be honest though, I’m a bit disappointed by the other users here. The quality of comments is really poor, both idiotic and adversarial. I’m talking fox news comment section level.
Yeah so is reddit. The best moderation and engagement in fediverse typically exists in the highly moderated communities that people constantly complain about not respecting their freeze peach and antisocial tendencies.
I’ve been seeing waaaay too much unwarranted vitriol and anger in comments lately, for things that really aren’t that big a deal (like Linux vs windows) and I find it disappointing. As a community we should want Lemmy to grow, and yes that does mean we will get more “normie” posts, but imo that’s good and if someone doesn’t like it they can use more niche community spaces, which there will be more of with a larger userbase.
for things that really aren’t that big a deal (like Linux vs windows)
LOL, Linux vs. Windows flame wars are literally as old as the World Wide Web, and UNIX vs. DOS flame wars are even older than that. Welcome to traditional Internet culture, undiluted by normies.
(Also, I would argue that copyleft Free Software vs. proprietary software riddled with spying, ads, and other user-hostile dark patterns is a way bigger deal than you’re giving it credit for, but that’s a topic for a different thread.)
Push back when you see it. Remind them that we have a chance to reset, and they don’t have to act the same way here that they did on reddit.
lemmy, reddit and such types of forums are literally made for this kind of discussion.
i do agree people should tone down with the unjustified anger a bit.
Reddit at this point a psyop for multiple different countries, political parties, celebrities, influenzars and such. US, Israel, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and others have Internet task force to push propaganda and limit negative PR.
Votes aren’t public in reddit and is a great cover for hiding any coordinated influence. Keep creating new accounts, make it seem natural by posting on random subs, use old accounts for posts/comments and new accounts for votes. To an unsuspecting user, nothing seems out of ordinary.
On ActivityPub all votes are public and manipulation can be detected or analyzed now or in future. Instance admins could check this and see a pattern. And there are many many many instances, so any one might run into something.
Also mod logs are public in lemmy, unlike reddit. Censorship from mods and admins are already a constant cause for drama but makes it a lot more transparent for the community.
So it’s less influential. So, they try to dissuade people from making Lemmy and Mastodon less interesting.
I’m not saying it’s not possible here, but it’s too early and needs a lot more work than reddit. People already do not interact with users from instances they dislike. You already see some patterns in how users of instance behave and avoid them.
Although since Lemmy votes are public, it does take some restraint to not message people that downvote your comments/posts and ask them why.
You can see who voted your comments? How? I don’t think I can.
There is one server implementation that shows it to its users. I forgot its name though.
I didn’t realise it’s only visible to server admins. I run my own server, and it seems like server admins can view the votes on any comment, not just for comments or posts on their server. Interesting design choice.
What I haven’t checked is if non-admins can load the vote data, and it’s just the button in the UI that’s hidden.
They’re visible to all the server admins. The difference is that anyone can make their own instance and connect to the network as an admin
Stupid people thinking little Lemmy is too complicated to use is a feature not a bug. If someone can’t figure out how to use the Lemmy interface why would we even want them here?
We got a glimpse of what a true exodus could look like, and I’m with you. As much as I’d love to see Reddit collapse from its own shittiness, for Lemmy’s sake I’d rather see a trickle who have a chance to learn manners and leave their vitriol behind.
Not saying Lemmy’s perfect. I’m not saying I’m perfect: I have bad days and make asshole responses, too. But they get swallowed, or I get a reasonable response and I apologize. In the main, the real, consistent excuses for human beings who resist the opportunity to become better people tend to join instances like Hexbear, and can be blocked en mass.
No one deserves to be called stupid just because they struggle with an objectively poor onboarding process and gate keeping.
I am perfectly able to navigate Lemmy’s interface and I still think it’s a pile of Garbage. It suffers from the same problem most projects suffer from. Designed by a programmer not a UX designer.
Also I would rather enjoy if Lemmy didn’t just become an echo chamber of extremism in the opposite direction of reddit. Cause at this rate Lemmy is already becoming a cess pit of echo chambers and extreme levels of gate keeping.
For that you need a board spectrum of people. Including those you seem “stupid”.
So fuck off with your gate keeping. Be helpful and set a good example.
Nah gatekeeping is good. I agree this place and the fediverse in general are massive echo chambers and that’s bad, but the more of the general public that gets on a platform the worse it gets. Obviously you can’t have an IQ filter or a test to get on, so a janky hard to use interface is good enough to scare away Facebook drones and brainrot zombies.
Agree. Some people are just too dumb to own a computer. Giving them access to internet is like giving a Kalashnikov to a monkey.
If the fediverse has any chance at properly succeeding it must create a “front page” for each alternative. Lemmy for reddit for example. There is no reason why all of lemmy can’t have a front page like old.lemmy.world with each community/platform on lemmy being connected and allowing for ease of access unlike what it is currently where you need a different account for every single Lemmy site
This is exactly why we need a software solution as an app for Lemmy rather than web + plugins
I know none that exist right now
you need a different account for every single Lemmy site
What are you talking about? You are using a lemmy.world account to comment in a lemmy.ml community right now.
I think its surviorship bias: the people who understand lemmy are on lemmy, not reddit.
Most of us are on both, because Lemmy still isn’t big enough
I maybe visit reddit once a month from search results - no longer as a user for 2 years come june
I’m on both to evangelise lemmy.
You’re doing the lords work.
Maybe, but I believe in Occam’s razer. The simplest solution is probably correct.
The average user is incredibly lazy. Insanely lazy. Reddit has taught them that they should be just spoonfed content constantly with no assistance. People aren’t used to going out to find communities anymore. To them even these basic concepts are then “frustrating” and “complex”. It’s unfortunate, but that’s really how lazy they are.
They can’t go to the search bar, type in television, and hit subscribe, it’s literally too much for them.
I think you described short form video like reels, tiktok, shorts users as well perfectly.
Sure, but the complaints I see are never “I don’t see content there that I like”, it’s always “its too complicated and I can’t sign up/see content at all”
but if you make it to any Lemmy site, you’re right there on the home feed instantly, same as reddit.
So is it really a problem of users not even making it to an instance? Are they really all getting brick-walled by join-lemmy.org, or is something else going on here?
There is an increasing difficulty to even find out that join-lemmy.org exists.
To be fair join-lemmy.org also is a rather awful bit of user onboarding. It’s very much a programmer design. Which is something all of Lemmy suffers from.
There’s fine line between a good design, and over simplification. But Lemmy is pretty firmly a mile away playing in the “it works” pool.
Also, Lemmy has ways of discovering communities. Just browse the all-local or all-federated feeds and you’ll see what communities are popular.
The “can’t sign up” complaints might have something to do with how most instances make you answer questions like “why do you want to sign up” and “what communities will you browse” as a simple way of stopping automated sign-ups, and if they didn’t put anything in the box or just said things like “IDK I’m from Reddit” they might have been rejected due to the admins thinking they’re a bot or spammer or something.
Gonna throw in my personal conspiracy theory (that I don’t have any evidence for): I haven’t been on Reddit Alternatives since I found Lemmy, but based on what i remember, there seem to be quite a few people who have spun up their own projects and are promoting them pretty hard on that subreddit. Who’s to say if one or more of them decided to buy bot comments to smear their competitors?
Yeah, that’s the type of motive I was struggling to find. I could absolutely see that happening.
I think a good chunk of them are just confused by going to join-lemmy and not be given a sign up in their face. Sure, we know that about 5 seconds of reading comprehension skill would get them where they want to go, but the vast majority of users don’t have that. Look how many people will walk up to a cash register/till with a sign on it that says “credit card only” and then be confused that they don’t take cash. Most people don’t read anymore.
People are ready for alternatives to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook… Can a community on reddit shutdown, and seamlessly transfer to lemmy within a few days while archiving the subreddits history? Will the new Lemmy be hands off moderation at the site level so that conversation can be had? If you can give people a yes to both people will join.
Yes. Of course the big platforms actively seek to undermine competitors. There’s billions of dollars at stake. Something that really convinced me was reading about how Facebook ran VPN services to spy on traffic so they could spot budding competitor platforms.
We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular. Something I’m not convinced they ever stopped doing. I believe reddit corporate still bots their own site for whatever purpose they require in the moment. I absolutely believe they troll their own site. Remember spez is the guy who live edits the production database.
We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular.
That’s not quite it. The founders made a few of throwaway accounts and posted a bunch of links that exemplified what they wanted people to post. It was fake activity, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t automated. It was maybe 50 posts and I don’t think it was a bad thing to do.
I used facebook way too much and the thing that got me to finally delete my account in 2011 was I had made a post about discovering diaspora and linking my account. Hung out with a friend a month or two later and he loaded up my facebook profile and could see every post I had ever made except the one about a federated facebook alternative.
Veering a little off-topic now, but facebook contacts being my irl friends made that feel so dangerous to me. If half my friends have opinion A and the other half opinion B, then if one opinion is entirely censored but I still see everything posted matching the approved opinion, that will have an enormous sway over how my worldview develops, in a way different from seeing strangers agreeing on those same things.
Most of the negative answers on /r/RedditAlternatives are either botted or bad faith.
!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com to see a few examples
I’m probably the least tech savvy person on Lemmy. If my dumb ass can figure it out, the subset of Reddit’s population who we’d actually want in Lemmy’s community should have no problem.
That said, onboarding could have been better, and you’re right about the potential hangups: “fediverse” sounds like some kind of federal government function like a hub website that links to all the different .gov agencies, and “Lemmy” sounds like a cartoon character. Choosing an instance was more stressful than it probably should have been; ultimately went with .world by blindly following the advice of a YouTube video, but on day 1 I was pretty oblivious to the extremist shit that’s associated with instances like .ml and had no clue what ‘tankie’ even meant.
That was two years ago though - no idea if that reflects what getting started is like today.
And again, that’s all coming from a relatively tech-dumbass, so I’d imagine it’s probably smoother for people less prone to starting a fire when they turn their computer turns on.
Edit: sorry to anyone who had to read that before the edit… when I’m tired I have an annoying tendency to think a word as I’m typing and then just skip to the next one. And I’m tired all the fucking time, so my posts have a lot of holes Q_Q
Has not changed one bit. If anything the onboarding experience has gotten worse.
Lemmy isnt new user hostile so to speak but it sure doesn’t try not to be.
And God, the number of times iv had to explain that frediverse doesn’t have anything to do with the feds is insane.
Lemmy has some of the worse terminology.
I have no idea what the instances even are, I didn’t realize it mattered, I just picked one at random. I still have no idea what they are or why it matters
If you’re interested, the short version is that instances (A.K.A servers) are run by different people in different places. A reason to move instances might be:
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My admin, the owner of the instance, has been doing things I heavily disagree with (bans, blocks, etc)
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I don’t agree with the rules on my instance.
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The instance is run in a country which criminalizes something that I care about, and so has to ban discussion of that thing (piracy, porn, etc).
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I want to run a community on a specific instance for whatever reason, and so need an account there
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And it’s okay! No need to understand those at first
I have zero tech skills and I’m here I do think the emails back and forth to get my original log in was obnoxious, it literally took days, and I have no idea how to start communities, I have no idea what the “federation” or “fediverse” is, I don’t understand “instances” and I really do miss Reddit for how easy all those things are but I figure eventually I’ll get it and this will feel like home. If all you want to do is make an account to scroll it’s pretty easy but I do agree everything else is hard/obnoxious and it will definitely slow down growth. That said I was on reddit since almost the beginning and growing quickly only came in the past several years and it really destroyed the site, so growing slowly isn’t inherently a bad thing. I do wish there was simple videos to watch on things like how to make a community though
Hmm, good idea, is there a ‘newtolemmy’ community?
Actually there is
