Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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?
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Don't over think it, the people who want to be here will be.
Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media (which Reddit is). Without attracting new users Lemmy will almost certainly perish. It's goal should be a low bar to onboard new social media users coming from places like Reddit, Facebook, X.
Saying "Not our problem" is a woefully shortsighted.
Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media
Lemmy is a protocol for networking individual privately hosted social media instances. It is not a panacea for corporate control of social media infrastructure. You're still hosting these sites on AWS / Azure / some other large corporately controlled private hardware setup. You're still securing the URL from a private DNS. You're still paying for these sites out of the surplus of a handful of wealth(ier) patrons and their friendly donors (or ending up like Hexbear.net, with a domain name up for grabs because it was mismanaged by part time broke amateurs).
Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.
There's not a lot we can do about it individually. I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP's image's "this is too weird and scary" attitude.
If popping into the Fediverse and just picking a Lemmy instance was as straightforward as selecting "Communities I'm interested in" on other bigger social media feeds, the onboarding would be smoother. But if you poke around and see people going whole hog frothing at the mouth "Everyone on <instance>.<whatever> is morally degenerate and has ruined the community at large!!!" reactionary in between instances, that's an immediate turn off that I don't think anyone within the Lemmy network knows how to deal with.
Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit, just ported into a more decentralized network. And it neglects the fundamentals of modern web hosting (we're all at the mercy of the IANA / Cloudflare, etc / the major hosting companies).
Lemmy is, itself, a shortsighted patch on a much larger and scarier problem. The instance infighting only reveals how shortsighted.
First off, there's nothing we can do about moving away from larger hosting Corporations, not with the technology we currently have. If we want to reach a national or international audience, we need infrastructure, and that has to come from somewhere; a business model makes sense. If you're hosting to a small community, you'd be able to get away with 1 selfhost, but to scale you'd need redundancies and bandwidth. The best choice we can make is the companies we would rather do business with. At this point, I'm definitely favoring Cloudflare and Azure (in that order) over AWS.
I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP’s image’s “this is too weird and scary” attitude.
I see this in a lot of comments about this so while I don't want to downplay the severity of this, I've personally never see instance in-fighting. Maybe it's the things I'm subscribed to, idk, but I usually visit both my local and all just to see what's going on. The Hexbear domain being sold is probably one of the first times I've run across discussions about other instances. Also, their domain being sold is lowkey hilarious. That was a problem as old as the internet (losing a domain). As we move to decentralization and privatization/ownership of data that's going to continue to be a thing I think.
Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit,
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the intra-channel fighting - is it just disagreeable people commenting, or is it like "This community is better than that" or "This instance is better than that"? I often see discussions on Reddit, arguing, bad faith actors, but I wouldn't classify that as in-channel-fighting. idk.
There’s not a lot we can do about it individually.
Complain. JoinLemmy is Open Source on Github. If you have ideas - share them. If you take a look through their issues and feel like adding in your 2 cents, go for it.
If a small, one time pop-up designed to solve your problem makes you give up on solving your problem then you were never going to solve that problem.
Unpopular opinion maybe but I like Lemmy and lemmy users and I'm glad that we're a bit different from Reddit. At least in my experience it feels a bit different.