A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
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?
Really early on like right after the API fuckfest, there was a large influx of users who picked servers based on whatever. As a result, servers defederated and there was a lot of drama as a result.
Though that said I haven't heard much about defederating in some time.
When half the posts in your feed are "X instance bad" people get just tired and go out.
It has happened to me sometimes a meaningful part of my feed was just people brigading about some instance they don't like. It's ridiculous.
this is about 0.1% of posts… quit lying
it feels like old reddit
Wait, when did that become a bad thing? I exclusively browsed old.reddit.com because the new layout is a fucking abomination.
That's the feature! Not a bug.
The new reddit design sucks and always has, other than dark mode.
I feel like most the old school redditors have long migrated, I've only ever heard good things about the new UI from relatively new users.
Lemmy is old reddit, if not OG internet ethos.
Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it 'wars'.
As for UX, there's definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstance without explicitly subbing to them all or using lemmyverse.net.
But I don't think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.
If that was a legitimate issue, MMO's (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn't have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.
Even if Lemmy was one big simple centralized server, that user would just come up with another reason they couldn't switch.
"Oh, it's too small, my niche communities aren't there"
"The UI isn't as nice"
"The mod tools aren't as good"
Etc.
Using Boost for Lemmy and it's almost like I never switched.
For the android users : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayayo.lemmy
Edit: ohhh, this may be better than Sync...
This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s
Unless we fix the UX problems in Lemmy, a Bluesky-like alternative of reddit is going to pop up, and overtake Lemmy, like what happened with Mastadon
I think the irony here is that the user-friendliness experience of Bluesky stems from it being a centralized service (in practice). I seriously doubt most people who signed up for Bluesky even understand what "decentralized social media" means.
I'm not saying Lemmy (and the greater Fediverse) can't improve, but it's clear that the biggest barrier for most people is the decentralized aspect itself -- the core of the Fediverse -- which is something one shouldn't really "hide".
As long as the state of social media usership demands centralized practices, then the Fediverse will forever be at a disadvantage in gaining mass adoption in my opinion.
What I don’t get is why not pretend it’s centralized and just recommend a server when you introduce someone to lemmy instead of trying to teach them?
Oh you want an alternative to Reddit, here, go to lemmy.ca since your Canadian.
I don't get how people get hung on choosing a server when people have been chosing a starter Pokémon since 1998 without any major issues. And you get just about the "same" amount of practical info.
Really, what tiktok does to a generation...
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.
I must be in the minority because I post so rarely that I don't sign up when I 'join' the platform, I sign up when I want to post something. When I first wanted to post something, I just joined the instance it was going to be on. (Also because it's queer, which I don't tell you about for consistency). I also don't care that much about not seeing what my instance has defederated. Or actually, not being able to comment on it, because I actually go on programming.dev sometimes, without having an account there. I don't really get it. The fact that my Instance technically requires an application might actually be a UX hurdle, but otherwise, you just click Sign Up, enter email, name, and password, and that's it, right? It could be a UX problem that you miss out on content you don't see, but you also already see a load of content that you're not going to miss out on. Tutorials on how x-instance moving works might be cool though, if they don't already exist. Making them more visible might limit the defederation FOMO.
Joining is a bad experience. "Please commit now to a server on this service you know nothing about... Then you can try it out!" I understand the concept of decentralization, but it's ass-backwards...
Reddit being popular is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy.
When you get right down to it: people don't care that Reddit is selling their information, that the site itself is a piece of garbage, that running the site requires a bunch of no-life weirdos whose numbers will only increase going forward and whose power will likewise, or that the design actively encourages bots to the point of disincentivizing actual human beings from using it.
They want their memes, they want their news, they want their niche little interest subs and they want their porn. The simple fact is that lemmy is a smaller version of Reddit with fewer options and to the majority of people who don't care about their data or the objectively dogshit running of the site, there is no reason to cross over to Lemmy.
Until Reddit takes a Musk-type turn into being totally unuseable, lemmy will only see a trickle of users who are burned by Reddit.
Wait wait wait... This implies people like new reddit... That shit makes my eyes bleed wtf
https://old.lemmy.world/ looks just like reddit. It's not the UI. It's network effect and there's not a lot to be done.
People are still on Twitter while the owner makes Nazi salutes and Bluesky is a 1:1 replacement feature-wise with a modern interface. People just don't like to move.
The fact that Bluesky is almost a 1:1 copy (which includes the dumb stuff like post character limit) is precisely why I don't like it.
Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
Not necessarily, but we don't want a accidental filter that filters out non tech savvy people. We want all kinds of people on Lemmy
Hell, it can filter out tech people too. I'm a programmer by trade, but I almost dipped on lemmy because the onboarding is confusing enough. Like, I obviously (mostly) figured it out, but I did consider going "eh fuck it" and dipping. The site is ultimately a luxury and not a requirement, so effort or confusion required to get all started up is also something that'll drive me to consider it not all worth it for some social media I'm not even sure I want to be a part of yet.