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?

  • Gustephan@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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?

  • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • joelghill@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • TeraByteMarx@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
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    6 days ago

    Why is “drama” on Lemmy always highly exaggerated by people?

    “Endless wars of who federates with who”. What is that person even talking about and who the fuck would even care as a normal user?

  • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • obsolete@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • daggermoon@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

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

  • evilcultist@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 days ago

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

  • endeavor@sopuli.xyz
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    5 days ago

    Reddit ux is also ass. Only difference between reddit and lemmy is that the federation bit is extremely confusing and not intuitive.

  • Rooty@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    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.

  • spacesatan@leminal.space
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    5 days ago

    “but it feels like old reddit”. My god, imagine actively preferring the new reddit UI. Let them keep their shiny jangling keys instead of coming over here and pestering the devs for a snoovatar feature or whatever nonsense.

    The ‘maybe read for 2 minutes to figure it out’ miniscule barrier to entry is a feature not a bug.

  • HalfSalesman@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • ad_on_is@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    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.