Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
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I remember being curious about the fediverse and when I first looked and saw "instances" I got decision fatigue.
I didn't know if an instance would limit me from interacting with others, could randomly disappear (ie hexbear domain), or if some instances would be a bad fit. I also didn't know of it was unchangeable. Decision fatigue set in and I was less excited, but still registered.
To overcome that, there should be a "randomly choose for me" button with notes next to it that say you can change later, it won't impact things, and you can interact with any instance. For random selection, just make it the top 3 most popular instances. Use a fun icon to indicate random change so the on boarding user has to think less.
Instances seem very confusing to an average user, as does federation. There could be an explanation like "Instead of 1 big company controlling everything, there are many copies of Lemmy that are in different places run by volunteers. These "instances" or copies are all Lemmy and can interact with each other, but having many copies means there isn't ever 1 big company who can set all the rules and suddenly change thing in a bad way. " and then the random selection button which almost everyone would choose.
The average user dosn't want to RTFM and also has an IQ of around 100 which is really low. The average reading ability of someone in the USA is like 6th grade level or something atrocious. You can't overestimate average intelligence in an in boarding process.
you can change later
You won't bring everything over
it won’t impact things
Lies! It will impact a LOT of things. Primarily your admins and federation. How could you possibly say that changing servers allows you to pick different admins (which is a good thing) but then say that the server doesn't matter? Plus there's server culture.
you can interact with any instance
Depends what server you're on
These things don't affect the average user (lurker) much at all. Ideally you just start with whatever instance and only move if you don't like it. A new user can't really know if an instance is bad or not before trying it.
(As long as the recommendation page doesn't give them an extremist instance)
Right, but that's the issue. It can give them an extremist instance and they join and get banned and never come back. The instance matters, and they know that intuitively, which is why they have choice paralysis in the first place. We should help them choose by providing information about each instance.
Right, but that's the issue. It can give them an extremist instance
Yeah but that's just join-lemmy, someone could make their own website that doesn't have this issue, even without overloading the user with info. It should only show instances that are middle of the road general instances.
Yes, that would be a good addition to the Lemmy ecosystem.
What I'm saying is, you can't agree that we should help them avoid extremist instances AND say that the instance doesn't matter.