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?
IMHO, the UX is bad, but the user base is also repellant. It’s further left than Reddit so most people who jump in bounce right off. That’s going to be difficult to change organically. Especially because most users respond to this with “good.” So there’s definitely no appetite to appeal to a wider audience. I predict Lemmy will become increasingly ideologically partisan and isolated.
Better UX than Reddit, they even point out that it’s like old.reddit instead of the trash UX they have now
It’s just dismissive to get people to agree without looking
Aren’t you guys sick of forced infinite growth in every aspect of our collective existence? The Fediverse is not shareholder owned, we don’t have to be slaves to The Red Line That Must Go Up. Reddit went to shit when it was aggresively mainstreamed, I don’t want it to happen to lemmy as well.
Add a bell button and a whistle button.
I think instead of promoting a page where people have to choose a server, just send people to lemmy.world directly. We should probably just get people to sign up there at first and have the ability to migrate their accounts to other servers if they want to do that later.
Having to choose from multiple servers is asking people to choose between a bunch of options they know nothing about. Get people straight to looking at content and posting stuff as soon as possible, once they’re more invested, and understand more about the different instances they can change servers if that’s what they want to do.
But yeah writhing the code needed to make account migration seamless might be a lot of work so not sure if that will happen.
Yea getting into Lemmy is confusing. I only use sync because it’s easier, I have no idea how to even access it on desktop. It definitely needs some QoL improvements before I can really start recommending it to people
There is a reason such a large part of Lemmy is developers. There’s no confusion signing up for the developers. Federations and servers and instances are all crazy jargon to regular people. Although we may not want all regular types here, having some more regular people to balance out all the high IQ techies could make things more fun.
Tbf I think it takes just a little web litteracy to understand the fediverse. I know I’m a developper, so I tried explaining it to my bro and he got it on the first try.
If you mention Lemmy, point someone towards a specific instance so it’s not so much of a shock. Then they can slowly learn about what it is.
Reading these comments I feel a sense of dread. You are all experiencing survivor bias. Initially when I ran into barriers I gave up for like a year before bothering to try Lemmy again.
If you don’t want Lemmy to serve as an actual counter to corporate controlled social media if it means letting in “normies” then you are content with corporate controlled social media continuing to dominate our lives. Which sounds about right for humanity. The smugness is vile.
Just bring on the vacuum decay event already.
Wait wait wait… This implies people like new reddit… That shit makes my eyes bleed wtf
I like new reddit. It works well, I just wish I could keep it the same as it is. I HATE Lemmy desktop UI and nearly went back to Reddit because of it. Voyager for mobile and photon for desktop. Honestly photon for both might be better but I’m apparently the 1% of people on Lemmy that actually prefer an app over a website 🤷♀️
Well I do like new Reddit. It has a dark mode and works well with different screen/window sizes. Sadly it’s slow and equires JS to load the content (makes it slow).
Imo Lemmy web is most of the good parts of old Reddit and some of good parts of new Reddit. Though it’s not the best UI. My favorite UI for Reddit is Redlib [1]. It’s fast, works well on desktop and mobile, and looks great imo.
I read a really good article recently about how people from different generations process information differently and so their UI preferences are wildly different.
The gist of it was
- A Boomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books. There are too many ads for books, so they tune them all out. They choose one by an author they know, that their friends said was good.
- A Gen Xer / Millennial walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They check the various authors they like, check that the cover art is appealing and read the backs of the different books, figuring out which one they want to read, then they buy that one.
- A Zoomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books, and feel bombarded by the ads for books. They check the authors the influencers they subscribe to on Youtube and Tik Tok say are good. They grab one of those based on the color of the cover, ignore the back and the cover art, flip it open to a random page, read that page and if what they read grabs their their attention they buy that book, but if it doesn’t, they move on.
As a result, each of these people will prefer to interact with vastly different UX.
Of course these aren’t hard and fast rules, set in stone and there are tons of exceptions, but it’s a definite trend.
The Lemmy demographic skews hard to the older Millennial / Gen X demographic and is mostly people who were on reddit 15+ years ago. It’s UI appeals to those people.
The problem is content, there isn’t any. Either I select all -> hot and see new content that almost feels like /r/subreddit_name/new or I select all -> active and while those have engagement, its all very old content, like a day old, two days old, etc. And then the other problem is that I only see two types of content usually: Either articles or screenshots from social media. Nothing else.
I just think that unless there’s a sudden influx of users for whatever reason, lemmy will never pick up. We just need more and more people, but have no way of getting them, not to mention so many communities just choosing not to migrate off Reddit, especially huge sports communities.
For the majority of commenters: UX is not UI.
The poor UX experience is the research a person has to do before they can even participate. You need to have a basic understanding of how the network works, and then you have to shop around for a server.
It’s enough friction to prevent people from on-boarding and that’s not good for a platform that needs people to be valuable.
99% of users are going to check out when you ask which server they want to join
I was on Sync for Reddit before going here, and checked out Lemmy as the devs switched platform. So the joke’s on them, my UX is basically identical.
That said, sucks that people shy away because of complexity.
Unfortunately, Sync for Lemmy is basically dead. Hasn’t been updated in nearly a year. I’m currently looking for a good alternative
Thanks for the heads up, seems like it might stop functioning properly in the future according to posts on the Sync community. Guess I’ll look around for some alternative in case that happens.
The UX for both Voyager and Sync seem really good. I’ve tried it out on a device, you can scroll before logging in, and when you try to create an account there aren’t loops to jump through and a default instance is pre-selected
Voyager is just Apollo for Lemmy is why I use it
Has software usage really gotten to the point where the average person can’t handle being given a choice about anything? Where it’s just too much effort to do anything more than mindlessly click on whatever is presented to them? 🤦
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.
There was a lot of debate about this when the reddit exodus happened in 2023. I initially joined then and have stuck around since. Something that was said a lot back then that I agree with is that Lemmy doesn’t have to compete with reddit. It’s alright for this corner of the internet to exist and not be the single dominant one.
If someone makes a reddit clone somewhere else with more liberal admins, good for them. I wouldn’t be going there. The fact that Lemmy is sectioned into servers is part of the appeal. I’m glad that I can be part of a server with very progressive administration. I would never get this level of moderation and support from any other social media. I’m fine with that meaning that uninformed people who just want to doom-scroll are less likely to come here.
We have seen growth periods time and again when problems arise with private social media companies. Each time, a little more people from the initial wave join for good. I think that’s fine. Most lemmy servers are run for free by people who just believe in what we’re doing here. We can always add more servers, but we can’t handle the kind of traffic that reddit handles. We’re entirely dependent on dedicated people investing large amounts of their time to create and maintain these spaces for us.
