It’s depressing how many top level comments or replies are about how people like that there is a technical barrier gatekeeping lemmy. Are yall actually leftists or do you just pretend to be while worshipping your own version of social hierarchy in which us nerds are on top?

If the miniscule effort of signing up for a platform keeps someone away, they probably wouldn’t be a good community member anyway.

We could stop bullying .ml users for being .ml users. That’s the only “war” I have seen here.

To the guy in here going “UX != UI!!!” Sure, but you can’t design UX, especially for the unwashed masses. “Tried cutting toenails with lawnmower; severed foot. 0/10 bad user experience.”

Lemmy has a “have our cake and eat it too” problem. It offers two mutually exclusive promises:

• Each instance is its own independent self-contained little Reddit with their own communities, culture, code of conduct etc. so that individuals can find a place that suits them or make one if none is available, and

• All the servers are part of one great big federated system where all users have access to content on all instances so it doesn’t matter which instance you sign up for, you can access it all.

In practice, the former is more or less true, the latter really isn’t.

First there’s the obvious topic of defederation, which makes the “join one server, access all of them” an outright lie. On the one hand, I think everyone here will agree this platform requires defederation to function so that we can kick out instances like lolli.rape or whatever, which thank you admins and mods for dealing with. But what about Hexbear, or Truth Social (which as I understand it is running on Mastodon software). The only honest answer to “where do we draw that line?” is “somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there.”

It is intellectually dishonest to say that Lemmy has this problem and Reddit doesn’t. Post in r/mensrights and an automod bans you from r/twoxchromosomes. Do basically anything anywhere on the platform and get banned from r/conservative. They managed to implement “It’s a different platform depending on who you are” on a monolithic service.

All that crap aside, the average user has a more limited perspective on the rest of the fediverse than his home instance. Often, the UI defaults to viewing only local posts, you have to tell it to give you a global feed. You can browse a list of your local communities, you can browse a list of global communities, you can’t browse a list of communities on a given foreign instance. ‘Show me everything on lemmy.sports’ or indeed ‘show me a list of communities on lemmy.nsfw.’ You cannot create (or moderate?) communities on instances you aren’t a member of. It is, if only slightly, easier to participate on your home instance than elsewhere.

Either your choice of server does matter, or it doesn’t.

If it does matter, we shouldn’t have so many general purpose instances, it should be lemmy.music and lemmy.art and lemmy.uk. Then newcomers are presented a meaningful choice. Are you mostly interested in discussions pertaining to your country? Your hobby? Your career? Sign up here to mostly participate in that, and no matter which you pick you can visit the rest of the Lemmyverse, too."

If it doesn’t matter, then design it such that instances are entirely transparent to users; eliminate the possibility of !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@lemmy.ml coexisting, and make all instances lemmy1.world lemmy2.world, issue credentials centrally and then just spread the load in the background.

I don’t think you can have both at the same time.

It should have an account creation process like those old RPGs where it asks a series of questions then says, “we recommend this server: <blah>. It is <one short sentence about its content>” then has click next to proceed or click “I want to choose another server” to just get a list.

1-hate, 5-love Do you like capitalism? Do you like tech? Do you like sports? Would you prefer a large server? etc

It should also be possible to skip the quiz and go straight to server selection at any point.

The main reason why I still prefer Reddit, is content. Even though I am subscribed to similar subs/communities/magazines/whatever on Reddit/Lemmy, my Reddit home screen is filled with interesting content compared to Lemmy. And, I never had to ban/hide anything/anyone on Reddit.

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.

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.

I’ve decided this is good and want a Lemmy that is restricted to just the nerdiest of nerds. These little spaces are cool without all those horrible reddit users.

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.

Bad UX isn’t keeping most people away from Lemmy. Not being able to give up their addiction to Reddit is what’s keeping them from Lemmy. There’s a lot of people who will complain about the shitty things billionaires and tech companies and politicians do to them, but aren’t willing to lift a finger to change things.

You’re never going to bring those people to Lemmy unless Reddit shuts down and you develop an algorithm to spoon feed them whatever they want to feed their doomscrolling habit. Lemmy is better off without 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.

Couldn’t we design an “onboarder” where when you get started on lemmy, a “let’s get you started” wizard asks you 2 or 3 questions and based on your answers, it proposes 2 or 3 servers (or directly assigns you to one)?

The tough part for me is that the reason I use Reddit is for bullshitting with people about sports teams I like. Lets look at some of the communities here.

• Baltimore Orioles – There’s one on lemmy.world with 150 subscribers. The last post is from 4 months ago and it’s a game thread posted by a bot with 0 comments. There’s also one on fanaticus.social with the last post from 7 months ago.
• Carolina Panthers – There’s one on fanaticus.social with 3 subscribers.
• Miami Heat – There’s one on lemmy.world with 10 subscribers.
• Pittsburgh Penguins – Again, lemmy.world with 11 subscribers.

I’d love to get off reddit but until there’s actually people to talk with, this place is just never going to meet the needs of sports content that I use Reddit for. I had no interest in Bluesky until some people actually got on it as well. The Shutdown Fullcast for college football brought a bunch of people and fans there so it gave some utility to the site. Without utility, there’s no reason to be here.

it feels like old reddit

Wait, when did that become a bad thing? I exclusively browsed old.reddit.com because the new layout is a fucking abomination.