gandalf_der_12tewe need more users
dantelI’m a very new user and who wanted to give this a chance, here are the friction points from my point of view:
In short the user experience is abysmal.
Someone in here already said it, but ‘Lemmy’ is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn’t bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I’m not sure I’ll stay.
You can say that again. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy
Guess what results come up first when you search for lemmy
Lemmy standing for “Marxist-Leninist” surely is off-putting to some. Might be better to re-brand it as “Feddit” (federated Reddit).
Names are a discrete and contested domain and honestly I don’t see how Lemmy being also a person is a hindrance. Coke is also a drug yet no one complains, certainly not the big corpo.
Protip: you can search for more than one word on search providers. Something like “lemmy social” or “lemmy server” for example.
I’m presented the same shit over and over again.
Do you sort by active? Use hot or scaled instead.
Yeah, it was sorted by active. Changed it to hot, let’s see how that goes. Thanks for the hint.
MoogleMaestroActive is basically like old forum logic, where new comments will bump it up back to the top. Scaled is my go to view first as it does a pretty good job balancing out communities of widely different sizes, so smaller communities that you’re subbed to have a chance of having their post be seen if it’s new and larger in upvoter count.
Die4EverAh true, I generally avoid all until I’m out of subscribed content or just looking for new communities
Scaled+All is hell on earth, but to be be fair it’s not its fault. It’s just… what Scaled is there to do. Thus works wonders in Subscribed, I’d argue it even works wonder on local unless you specifically need newest local-relevant content (eg.: local news).
I am also new (coming from Reddit) and it was confusing that there was no register button anywhere. I also agree a lot on the naming, when I searched for it to get some info on what it is and how it works I first got a lot of results for the Lemmings game. Also when you search in the playstore for “Lemmy” you get the Lemmings games…
NutomicThere is a “Join” button which goes directly to the registration page of the respective instance. Would it be clearer to rename this? Other than that I’m also happy to make improvements if you have concrete suggestions.
Edit: Made a PR to rename Join to Sign Up: github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/509
Well, I don’t understand exactly how it works yet. My steps were to search in the Play Store for Lemmy, but there were multiple apps and all had different names. When I downloaded Boost now, there was not directly a register or sign up button. So it’s probably an issue of Boost.
There is nothing preventing apps from providing a registration flow. For example Voyager has it. I suppose the problem is again which instance to choose for signup. You can discuss this in lemmy.world/c/boostforlemmy or lemmy.world/c/lemmyapps.
As for multiple Lemmy apps being available: Most of the current Lemmy users came here in 2023 when Reddit locked down the API and killed third-party apps. Thats why a lot of apps are now available, and everyone can decide for himself which one he prefers.
HubiI agree. New user introduction is very poor. Took me ages just to choose an instance - and that was in no small part because I’m here not only to escape the enshittified chokepoint capitalism of american big tech, but also because I’m utterly sick of the domination of US centric points of view and censorship. Even though i know communities are not instance locked, I wanted an instance that is not likely to be managed in the same way. Time will tell if I chose well or poorly
OpenStarsFwiw that’s a very popular instance you are on, so I think you will likely enjoy it? But if not, then that is the beauty of the Fediverse: you can always hop over to some other one if you wanted.
Like email providers: if gmail doesn’t suit you, then switch to another one, or even self-host your own if that sounds appealing:-P.
Note here there is zero advertising: none. Therefore, no incentive to try to “(ab)use” you as the product. Conversely, features offered to you are significantly slower to be developed (honestly PieFed is so very far ahead of Lemmy in that respect, e.g. offering keyword filters such as “Musk” or “Trump”, and advanced AI slop detection, etc.). So instead of thinking how different platforms will fall over themselves trying to compete for your “business”, think along the lines instead of how you can match up with other like-minded folks. And at some point you’ll want to contribute - perhaps code development, or donations, though what the Threadiverse needs most is just participation, as in content posted to it, the more thoughtful the better.
So far you are off to a fantastic start, welcome! :-D
Features - PieFed
Nice things about PieFed: There are two other options for reddit-style federated forums, Lemmy and Kbin (recently forked to Mbin, which shows some promise). Having used them both extensively I came away unsatisfied, for a variety of reasons. It is unlikely that their trajectory will change in future, either. However we all owe those projects […]
Have you considered trying out Piefed? Piefed has custom feed options currently.
The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn’t help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
I don’t really know how you make the onboarding, the instance selection easier at this point. What do you propose?
What site did you use when you found lemmy?
I’m a reddit user and that’s also where I first heard about lemmy the first time.
Yesterday I decided to give it a try, current events pushed me away from everything American and so I thought it was about time.
I searched for something like ‘lemmy getting started’ and landed on this site: join-lemmy.org/docs/…/01-getting-started.html
So the first greeting is a wall of text. After I read through it, I found myself here: join-lemmy.org/instances
Now I got a bunch of options with no real way to evaluate what’s what. I spent some time there looking through the options and didn’t really know what to choose and what the impact would be. I used a search engine again to look for some opinions about the biggest ones which lead me nowhere, mostly
So I kinda have up and selected programmers.dev because that’s close enough to what I do professionally. I clicked on join and was presented with this programming.dev/signup
So I don’t know if that differs from instance to insurance, but you need a moment to process this. The first few fields are obvious but then it starts to get a little weird. Instead of a checkbox or even implicit accepting of TOS and privacy policy (by registering here you agree to…) you have to take or copy paste that exact sentence into that answer box with a preview button(?) and then fill in the captcha. After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
But it didn’t end here. Because I found that the webui wasn’t that great on mobile, I wanted an Android app. So I ended up here: join-lemmy.org/apps
And yet again was confronted with a bunch options I somehow had to evaluate. I’m still in the process finding an app I really like.
Now I know this is no rocket science, and having options is a good thing usually.
But still considering the average usually not tech savvy user, all of that is too much by quite a bit. That’s overwhelming for the majority of people.
This whole thing needs to be a 10 second streamlined process. There should be one button to get you started. The instance selection site tells you: ‘You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which one you choose.’
So if that’s the case, why bother the user with it? I admit I know jack shit about the fediverse, but if I were to design such a thing, I’d separate the IdP (identity provider) from the service/content providers. Have a couple of them redundantly, hosted by different parties so one entity can not shut down everything. Let the user register once, replicate that identity across the IdPs and let some interest selection wizard determine which content instances the use should be added to.
I know that’s a big architecture change and will never happen. So maybe have that one obvious registration routine for a user and choose a first instance for the user based on interests or randomly (from a curated list to prevent users landing on some extreme instances) if the user can not be bothered to fill in their interests.
Have one default app which is good and recommended that. Let the app have sensible defaults (like the sorting thing), present most popular content first to hook the user.
Let the user look for alternatives later if they want to do that.
Don’t let the user do all the homework upfront before they even know whether they even care and if it’s worth the effort. Most people simply won’t do it.
PS. Nope I do not know about ‘Piefed’. I’ll check it out later. It wasn’t mentioned on all that sites that I looked at and that’s part of the problem.
That’s just my 2 cents.
PS. Nope I do not know about ‘Piefed’. I’ll check it out later. It wasn’t mentioned on all that sites that I looked at and that’s part of the problem.
Piefed was made much later, and many of the Lemmy documentation sites simply haven’t been updated.
The problem with join-lemmy is that they removed lemmy.world from their listings because they thought it was too prominent, and now it just randomises servers. Which is not a good idea. At the same time, I don’t think a process in which everyone is bundled into lemmy.world is good. It just entrenches centralisation.
Here is the instance chooser that @[email protected] mentioned.
There are a ton of features that PieFed has that Lemmy lacks. Like Reddit’s, PieFed’s “search” feature sucks ass (by design, as it is not the top priority right now), and Lemmy’s btw is super fantastic, though you don’t even need to have a user account to use Lemmy’s search feature, and everything else is better on PieFed, often by a lot (but, some very few not as good though). PieFed even has features that Reddit itself lacks - which makes sense when you realize that all features that Reddit has pumped out in the past 10 years or so have been to increase their profit margins rather than offer any functionality that users themselves wanted.
PieFed is the future of the Threadiverse. Many instances have already or are currently in the process of switching over to it. At least give it a look? The sign-in process will surely convince you to stay, but if not then we’d all be interested to know your thoughts on what turned you away too?
Oh, one major caveat: most of PieFed’s most advanced features (such as polls, user and post flairs, categories of communities, topic areas and user-customizable & shareable feeds, etc.) are not available yet from 3rd party apps, which having been designed for Lemmy originally they are still mainly restricted to the basic functionality that Lemmy offers. Even there, imho having to visit the PieFed website UI rarely to turn on an option that would affect daily/hourly interaction via a 3rd party app still makes PieFed more worthwhile compared to Lemmy that does not even offer those kinds of features at all - e.g. the ability to block all users from an instance.
Ah, no in this context I was referrng to the join-lemmy instance chooser that I think they joined through which removes lemmy.world (because of their idea that it’s too big) and randomises the servers a new user automatically sees. You can change it to sort by most active but because lemmy.world is not there, lemmy.ml and hexbear are right at the top (and it won’t mention that hexbear is widely defederated).
Thanks for the clarification. I thought at some point you were mentioning how the wall of text at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html somehow never once mentions PieFed as an option, but I think that’s excellent that you mentioned those additional details.
Thanks for your feedback!
You landed on join-lemmy.org/docs/…/01-getting-started.html to get started but you should have landed on join-lemmy.org which is a much simpler UI, i think. Somebody sent you the wrong link. I think, there should definitely be a more prominent link to the actual “sign up here” page.
I’d separate the IdP (identity provider) from the service/content providers
That is indeed a good idea and i’ve never heard it formulated like this before, but i gotta think about it now.
After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
That is definitely a big problem that should be changed; I’m not sure but maybe you should get an E-Mail after your registration is successful and maybe you should also be able to log in and use the account immediately (up to a limited extent) without waiting for manual confirmation.
After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
This is wrong or outdated, Lemmy definitely sends an email once your registration is approved or denied (if you provided an email during registration). Worth contacting the programming.dev admins to change this line.
@[email protected] for the love of god please fix the onboarding
I checked the contact section and it uses the .ml support account so maybe he does
That just might be where they set up for support questions.
That would mean that lemmy.ml chose to remove lemmy.world from there, which I would think would upset lemmy.world mods.
I believe they publicly stated they removed .world from it to prevent centralization because everyone was going to a single instance, thus defeating the fediverse purpose. But this is all from memory.
Yes, that’s correct. But I’m not aware of lemmy.ml mods running it is all I mean. That it randomises the instances for newbies on first view isn’t great either.
Good point, I made a PR to use biased random sort again that we had in the past, so larger instances are always shown near the top.
The logic it uses is to hide any instances with more than 30% of all active users to prevent centralization, just like you say. There are also some other filters like requiring at least 5 active users.
Understandable but something needs to be done to lower the barrier of entry of new users joining.
Funny enough, a lot of that ends up feeling similar with the move to Linux (and its many distros). It got a very good shift because of Microsoft voluntarily deciding “This OS will be horrible for everyone now.” but Reddit hasn’t had anything so egregious. Even Linux has a few issues with content/apps from not having enough contributors.
The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn’t help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
The solution to this is that people should not recommend Lemmy, but a specific instance such as programming.dev (depending on the audience). The Lemmy software and join-lemmy.org are mainly targeted at potential instance admins, or those who are already familiar with the Fediverse.
Well, you are technically correct. That would’ve made it easier for me. But I see a few problems with that:
How are you gonna make sure people start doing this?
And even more important: If people start doing this, it might actually harm the network IMHO.
I personally knew that something like Lemmy exists at all because I saw multiple people on Reddit recommending it as an alternative to Reddit. Often enough that I was able to remember this after some time.
Now if people recommended programming.dev in one sub, literature.cafe in another and discuss.online in a third - there is no way I would’ve remembered any of it and most likely wouldn’t know that it belongs to the same network. Looking at them individually emphasizes the feeling that those are some ultra niche little sites with hardly any users on them.
Just my gut feeling, anyway.
That is true. I made a post just now to gather suggestions for improving the website, please have a look and comment if you have any ideas: lemmyverse.link/lemmy.ml/post/41719890