Fediverse

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.

Fully agree with that, the bar is too to high usually unless you're being handheld through the process, realistically there should be an app like how blue sky is that doesn't give you any of the options because less options means easier setup. If they want to jump instances after that that would be considered an advanced function but they can choose to do so on their own accord.

Another issue I think is lack of actual awareness, like Bsky got media coverage, the everyday person still is like "the hells a lemmy"

I'm all on board except for the comment about micro-penises. No one should ever resort to body-shaming.

Leave the micropenis guys alone, it's already a shit card to be dealt.

LEMMY IS FUN PLEASE

imo this friction will erode as larger instances come into play; people will join a large, main instance without even knowing of the others, and-- if they have a problem with the instance they joined-- they'll find they can easily jump ship there.

What can we do?

File issues on the GitHub for how to improve the UX, and put thumbs up reactions on issues so the devs know which issues to prioritize

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues

Or even better, make pull requests if you're a dev

I use Boost for Lemmy. The transition from Reddit was easy for me, and I know little about the fediverse other than the most basic outlines.

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.

I’m going to be holding a teach-in about the fediverse. AFK I mean. Like the people I live with, and am in community with in meat space. They all want to ditch corpo social media, but aren’t sure how. I’ll hold a digital one too for my more extended community, but I want to start with the people I truly live with. I think word of mouth is a great way to onboard people as it allows for a dynamic level of handholding. This is essentially “grassroots” social media after all.

I don’t really want Reddit to join Lemmy en masse. I want the people that see the value of pre-2010 social media, and the “local” internet, to understand and have access to these tools and spaces. I think that will be best done through education, not advertising. Advertising the platform is exactly what all the platforms we want to ditch do, and we are actively trying to not be those platforms.

The sense of “needing” more users, to me at least, is a hold out of the “infinite growth”, capitalist, mindset. I don’t want infinite growth for my instance, I want the people it’s made for to find it, and enjoy communicating with the people they share it with.

I'll be ditching reddit completely after 16th of April. Till then I'm slowly doing my migration. Lemmy is awesome.

Lemmy only really became usable for me after I blocked certain instances/communities. Tbh if I wasn't permabanned from Reddit I probably would have quit early on and went back to Reddit.

This wasn't because of UX. It's was because some of the most active and highly upvoted instances that had posts hit All constantly were full of terrible people and idiots.

However now that I realize how powerful that is to be able to block whole instances and curate your experience and realize that it's basically impossible to Permaban someone from Lemmy, I'm enjoying it a lot more.

That happened to me in the reddit exodus, I switched to Lemmy and faced a lot of analysis paralysis, ended up in Lemmy.world out of spite and then I regretted my decision.

So yeah, in my experience it's bad UX design, it felt like gatekeeping tbh.

The second this hurdle is crossed we'll need a new Lemmy

whatever, just make a lemmy app that defaults to lemmy.world i guess

Those comments are fairly meaningless. Federation wars? Where? There was some controversy like a year ago from why I recall and everyone has moved way on. I wouldn’t even consider that UX either.