Asklemmy

As an old, I just realized why the time I spend on Lemmy is less soul-destroying than equivalent time on Reddit.

I enjoy searching for topics of interest more than being spoonfed content. So in this respect, the difficulty of Lemmy is the point.

I get it that this is an aging hipster point of view, so really we are fighting for the soul of Lemmy.

How much appeal do we really want?

How fast do we want to grow?

What order should major features be implemented in? (Let alone the debate over which features.)

This debate will never end. Get used to the defederation wars. It is akin to “Am I my brother’s keeper”? This is among the first questions asked in Genesis and God declined to answer. We will fight about it till the end of time.

My best hope is that enough quality instances host quality communities that I can curate my own experience to make so-called social media serve me, not a tech company.

I thought that was the point?

Loads more unnecessary and weird political comments on completely unrelated posts. On Reddit it depended much more on the subreddit whether you'll get those weird comments, on Lemmy I found lots of comments up high on various non-political communities which just repeat certain political combat slogans on many posts.

Even when I sympathize with 'that side' moreso than the opposite one, it's just dumb and annoying to me.

I don't like all the communities that moved from Reddit that are just using bots to cross post shit from Reddit to here. All those communities seem to have are the bot posts. I'm not commenting to a bot; it won't respond. I don't know how many humans would see it, because literally no content is posted by a human. I post my own content, but then it's buried by the bot spamming stolen content.

I get the idea was to seed the community and make it appear active, but it just has the opposite effect. If I was to block the bot as I usually do because I don't care to engage with bot content, that community would be dead. At the very least, hide the fact it's a bot and make me believe it's a human I'm talking to.

Wow. All the top comments are about finding / joining / onboarding.

It's just super unattractive to join.
Discovering communities is easily the #1 complaint
Onboarding is unclear for people

I genuinely don't understand this criticism about the fediverse. It seems like people just want to be told what to do. I totally understand that this isn't a vertical platform like Reddit or Twitter but that doesn't prevent anyone from participating in the platform. It just means that you need to look for what you're interested in rather than be told what you should be interested in.

Multiple communities with the same theme in diverse servers mean lots of repeated information in my home page.

I've commented recently about the redundancy of communities - which I think is a related criticism to knowing what community to join (as opposed to instance). If I'm on this instance but another instance has a community of the same name, which should I join? Both? Meh. It's not something to stand in the way of using the platform at all but it is a bit annoying.

Anyway, my one "complaint" is just that the niche communities I'm a member of on Reddit don't exist here. Specifically, communities for buying and trading things like r/photomarket.

This is still a relatively new platform. It's going to take some time for it to build itself organically. It feels to me that a measurable amount of content on the platform is critiquing the platform. I think it would be more conducive if we all spent less time critiquing and more time generating original content - not stuff cross-posted from other platforms. I mean, in general, if you're searching the web for "a thing", the results aren't going to direct you to the fediverse unless you're specifically searching about something regarding the fediverse. Showing up in search results might be the tipping point that drives more users to join the platform.

I want the app to open to frontpage, aka only the communities I subscribed to, sorted by New. I want it to take zero clicks to get here; I just want to open the app and have it there.

Apps are updating rapidly of course, but the last time I went through the main Lemmy apps on Android, the best one still took two clicks to get to my preferred view every time I close and relaunched the app.

As a general rule, the onboarding and discovery in the fediverse is pretty bloody terrible.

Its just super unattractive to join. If I am thinking about joining a platform I want to know if there is content that is interesting to me. Now if I go to https://join-lemmy.org/ what do I see? It greets me with explanations of the Licensing, tells me all the programming languages and frameworks, shows me pictures of code and something about mod tools and of course immediately offers me to run my own server. None of that is even remotely interesting to me even now that I am a registered user. Not to mention that the design is questionable. Then it says "Join a server". I am not here to join a server, I am here to join a platform. And if I click on that I am met with about 50 different instances, of which I have no idea what to choose and what implications my choice has.

The whole federation thing, the design, everything is just unintuitive and unattractive to join.

Links between instances often don't work as intended, and there's no good way to redirect me from some-other-instance.pub/c/cool-community to my-instance.pub/c/[email protected] automatically.

The "front page" of lemmy, either the local of the instance you're on or the "all", is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I'm not sure what the issue is with lemmy's front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?

It's too bad because the "front page" is the user's first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.

In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.

To me, all the complaints in this thread are a great filter. It keeps away all the people that are too lazy and/or incapable to figure out basic things, which are not the people I want to interact with online anyway

where are the technical criticisms?

It has sort of been said already, but I didn't find a reply stating my exact criticism so I'll chime in. Lemmy and the fediverse is confusing. Instances, federation, de-federating, and all the other techno-garble is not something most internet users have any frame of reference for and I imagine it is very off-putting to a vast majority of potential users.

I'm not usually one to harp on user experience but it's just a mess trying to get into this whole thing. I was driven by a hatred for reddit to figure it out and I'm a software developer by trade, but still was scratching my head at wtf all these terms were and how it all works. Lemmy and the fediverse desperately needs some onboarding/marketing work and to ditch this sentiment of "if you can't figure it out then we don't want you here."

There shouldn’t be votes. Activitypub itself shouldn’t have votes but I can understand the broader community around it wanting them to kludge in functionality of places they’re trying to ape.

If you’re coming from Reddit or wherever though and don’t see this as a perfect opportunity to get rid of the part of the site all the problems stem from or are enabled by, I don’t know what to say.

Get rid of the votes.

The redditors are really racist and really anticommunist sometimes. I get that the admin wants a diversity of opinion but the orientalism feels pretty intense nowadays