- cross-posted to:
- fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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?
Joining is a bad experience. “Please commit now to a server on this service you know nothing about… Then you can try it out!” I understand the concept of decentralization, but it’s ass-backwards…
The reddit concept of subreddits also doesn’t work well with federation IMO (at least no Lemmy’s implementation).
Want to talk about video games? Well, there’s no /r/games, instead there are bunch of different /c/games on different servers with varying amounts of activity. You basically gotta make the “pick a server” decision again whenever you post something. If you make the wrong choice, your post might not get seen by anyone, and even if you post to the biggest sub, you’ll be missing out on eyeballs from people on other servers who aren’t subscribed to that instance for whatever reason.
For example, lemmy.ml/c/linux_gaming and lemmy.world/c/linux_gaming have around the same number of subscribers. Should I post to both? Maybe the same people subscribe to both, so that’s pointless? Or maybe I’ll miss out on a lot of discussion if I post only to one? There’s no way for me to know.
For me, it makes Lemmy less useful than reddit for asking really niche questions and getting useful answers. For posting comments on whatever pops up in my feed though, it works great.
I don’t have any good solutions to this, and I’m sure it has been considered already. When I first joined, I remembered seeing people bring this same issue up, but it doesn’t seem like it went anywhere? (Or maybe it did?)
I think this is a wrong mindset, you are supposed to be posting for the community, for the members of that community, not to be seen and praised through all the instances because that’s how we got to the problem of getting the same post repeated over and over by the same person/script in all.
Of course that’s my old man way of thinking, things should be posted once and let it federate, if it didn’t reach an instance someone else might post it there, no need to hold all the glory, karma is just a number on lemmy anyway.
Unless they are a seller, then I’d see a reason for them to be creating spam.
I think that’s more of a feature, not a bug. It means if one group is doing a shitty job of running their community, it’s easier to find another group of the same nature. I’ve noticed a lot of communities on .world are run a lot like the most popular subreddits where moderation of posts is highly aggressive, and seems aimed more at curating “high quality content” than actually being a community. Okay, easy enough, I just start posting to similar places on other instances, or start my own.
Also
.ml and world don’t really share the same views and vibes
Some communities consolidated. Electric cars did a few weeks ago. Cooking communities back in the days.
Some communities prefer to stay on their own.
!communitypromo@lemmy.ca is trying to solve that issue, but regularly posting “the” community on a topic. But you can’t prevent everyone to create new communities, the same way 90% of the subreddits are probably empty with a mssing mod
Man. You just gave me an idea (which would matter if I wasn’t a complete idiot).
Instead of servers that all attempt to be a sort of clone of Reddit, servers could focus on content similar to the way subreddits work.
So you’d join any one of these servers and federate with other servers just like now, only content would be focused between servers.
Example:
This server is a games server. It has /c/games, /c/fallout, /c/vintagegaming, etc.
This server will focus on news and politics. It has /c/worldnews, /c/marketnews, etc.
Sure, it would still have the issue of being fractured, but it would narrow it down so much that it would be more appealing and easier to navigate.
It’s probably too late for that.
Ultimately, I’m happy with the fediverse. Algorithms aren’t dictating what I see. There’s no profit incentive that will lead to bad decisions, so when bad decisions are made, folks will talk about it and come to a solution.
I miss old Reddit, but it’s gone.
That’s what that Star Trek server did.
The problem with that is that you need to make a user on one of those servers. Do you make it on the politics one, or the games one? What happens 3 months later when you realize the server you picked on a whim is full of assholes and gets defederated?
Do you think an average user at that point would move their subscriptions to a new account or will they get annoyed at the concept?
I can’t speak for other people, but if lemme.world were to shut down today I’d just pick another server.
I will admit, it was confusing and almost turned me off at first. I was very upset about the whole deal with third party apps on Reddit. My daughter gave me the whole email analogy and it cleared my hesitation to join Lemmy.
I don’t know how it is today, but I had to apply to join world when I first got on. It would be awesome if an app would sign a person up for, say, three different servers and sync settings between them. Something goes down, wouldn’t even notice.
Assholes ruin everything though and making it easier for bot accounts to exist would end badly.
I don’t know.
When I first got on here it was a mess. It didn’t work half the time and when it did no content was being generated. I stuck it out though and I’m glad I did.
I’m definitely not the right person to come up with any solutions.
Why would you? The communities are accessible from every federated instance
https://lemmy.world/c/startrek@startrek.website
My point is you have to pick SOME server to host your account. You are right that most communities are accessible from most servers, but that is where it becomes confusing for someone who just wants to look at memes for a specific fan base.
https://lemmy.zip/
https://programming.dev/ is for programming
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/ hosts a lot of queer communities
I prefer !android@lemdro.id to the !android@lemmy.world
I think some servers do that? They definitely try to cater to niches.
It is definitely not too late for that.
The idea that one must commit, is the problem. At first, I signed up for 3 or 4 servers. It needs to be pointed out that no commitment is necessary.
So now you are telling a user to make 3 or 4 accounts at once
Not necessarily. That’s just what I did.
The point is, they aren’t making a permanent decision. They can switch or move at any time for any reason.
Yeah but you have to see it through the normal-user eyes, for them just creating a new account is a whole ordeal, then they see that ordeal makes them investigate the server before picking and then it turns out they picked wrong… For them that’s that and they delete the app (never deleting the account, mind you), branding the whole lemmy experience under whatever server they picked first.
If there was some sort of… Quiz? That could help them pick… But a brutally honest one, since some instances have pretty extremists opinions, new users have to know what they are dealing with.
People like to commit, though. They want to commit. They want to make an account and be done. The ability for established users and communities to move around is a great feature that makes Lemmy superior to other sites, but it really needs to work on making new users feel comfortable enough to stay put when they’re first figuring things out, because if a new user decides to leave, they’re probably not switching instances, they’re switching platforms.
That’s a good point. May be true.
Was your experience different between those 3-4 servers or was it pretty much universally consistent?
One didn’t allow down votes. Seemed like a good idea. I rarely down vote. But in practice, when I do it’s for a reason. And I want the option.
Another went down for roughly a week. So that didn’t work out.
Which is one reason I embraced Communick; a paid instance. Been here since.
I originally joined KBin because I liked the interface better than lemmy.
When I joined lemmy.world I just picked it because it was the most populous.
I haven’t even given it a second thought about changing because I don’t know why I would. It seems pretty arbitrary which instance you join.
Why not https://fedia.io/ ? It uses Mbin, the successor of Kbin
At this point I am lacking motivation to change. Why bother switching now?
I like the analogy that Lemmy is like an email provider. Many possible providers, one Internet. Maybe we could get more traction if Lemmy were promoted in a similar manner? Or even have email service like sdf.org?