this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 minutes ago

I sincerely hope there's less content here than Reddit, forever. I hope the UI keeps the masses out, and the technically savy are the only ones here.

I want to doomscroll less, I want to be astroturfed less. I want to interact with more humans and fewer bots, even when that means I interact less. I want fewer AI prompts, AI Art and corpo spam ads masquerading as engagement. I want less video and more text. Overall, I want to be spending less time on the internet, on my phone, and I don't want to hear about every last toxic thing Trump did to drive me crazy. Lemmy helps me control that feed better, so I deleted my reddit account and I hope to stay here until I manage to stop opening social media at all.

Lemmy right now feels like the internet before the long september. I hope it never changes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 36 minutes ago (1 children)

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.

[–] piecat 3 points 3 minutes ago

The less profitable we are, the less they'll bother us.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 27 minutes ago* (last edited 26 minutes 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 minutes ago

You're right, but you're also not seeing some of the great and diverse content on Lemmy. Obviously reddit has a fuckton more content. Network effect and all that, but my Lemmy feed is not as you describe. I'm subscribed to a bunch of Linux, FOSS, privacy, music, and other great communities. While I do see articles and screen caps when I browse the all feed, my curated feed is full of questions, discussions, new (to me) music and more.

It certainly takes some effort to curate a feed for yourself, but it can be done.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago
  • [email protected] can help
  • "Top Day / 12 hours/ 6 hours" works better than Hot
  • "New comments " works better than Active
[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 hours 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.

[–] finitebanjo 3 points 3 hours ago

Even worse, the Tankies are basically running the landing page that asks them which instance to join.

We should probably make a non-tankie version and get it trending for the Algorithm.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours 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: . It is ” 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 hours ago (5 children)

I disagree that this is a concern. If you are already exaggerating about federation wars, chances are you already tried lemmy and know a good bit about selecting instances. The average user will not care as much as you do.

The average user will go to join-lemmy site, will not care at all about the different instances and likely choose the biggest one or first one they see. None of them will think "oh no this one is involved in federation wars" because thats not something you find out before knowing some about the fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

The average user, me, will go to sign up, kinda briefly go to Wikipedia on fediverse, still not understand, and pick a random server, and then here I am trying to figure it out as I go

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

The average user will go to join Lemmy and abort, because they can't grasp the idea that joining one server gets them into other servers. They worry about server selection, have analysis paralysis, and nope out. That's why they're asking for a bluesky reddit and not a mastodon reddit.

Normie's want centralization because they don't understand how else it can work and while some can learn and have it explained many will give up before giving it a chance.

[–] DeepSeaHexapus 2 points 4 hours ago

That's about how it worked for me when I first tried giving it a go about a year ago. Wasn't until today when I saw that Reddit post talking about paywalling some subs that I decided to give it another go.

In fact that post had a pretty decent write up of how to set up Lemmy and what it was. Probably the only reason I managed to kinda figure it out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Somehow most people figured out email. It's like picking Gmail, Outlook, Proton, Mailbox, Yahoo. Doesn't matter, pick the one you like, create as many accounts as you want, or make your own server if you want.

This isn't a Fediverse or Lemmy problem, but is speaks volumes of how broken the Internet has become and how far we've fallen. 😔

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

The average user that will get to join-lemmy will GTFO.

The average user gets their Google account by opening their device and going step by step with nice animations.

Find a person that already has an apartment, bills, work, relationship and isn't working in tech.

A. Ask him to join lemmy. Ask after a month if it happened (spoiler, it didn't). B. Help him open an account, check after he month if he kept it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

The average user that will get to join-lemmy will GTFO.

The average user gets their Google account by opening their device and going step by step with nice animations.

Find a person that already has an apartment, bills, work, relationship and isn't working in tech.

A. Ask him to join lemmy. Ask after a month if it happened (spoiler, it didn't). B. Help him open an account, check after he month if he kept it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

whatever, just make a lemmy app that defaults to lemmy.world i guess

[–] lunarul 1 points 24 minutes ago

Or just go to vger.app, which defaults to lemm.ee but allows you to register and log in with a whole bunch of different instances.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Bad choice, many new users specifically came here because of [email protected], which can't be accessed from lemmy.world.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

i would guess the piracy audience doesn't struggle with the same problems that would make a default instance useful

[–] [email protected] 44 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (9 children)

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.

[–] lunarul 1 points 23 minutes ago

UX experience

We should shorten that to UXX

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

That's what I send to people:

"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

Feel free if you have any questions"

What research is needed?

[–] Xella 5 points 7 hours ago

Yes. Lemmy is not friendly for the "average" user. We could come up with a list of severs with pros and cons to them and then people would feel more comfortable. I came here the moment reddit killed the API and I was so confused. Federated anything meant nothing to me and I discovered lemmy.world so that's just what I joined. LOL I still don't know the difference between servers.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

imo this friction will erode as larger instances come into play; people will join a large, main instance without even knowing of the others, and-- if they have a problem with the instance they joined-- they'll find they can easily jump ship there.

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[–] Iheartcheese 7 points 7 hours ago

LEMMY IS FUN PLEASE

[–] AA5B 12 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

Maybe it’s personal bias but I’d put a lot more weight into the comments about

  • too few members
  • wtf is multiple servers?

While I understand the power, the ideal of multiple federated servers, I still see it as an impediment for use. I know there’s online descriptions but I fail to see why I need to research and choose a server, especially when none really have the membership to support smaller communities yet

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

The biggest advantage of federated social media is that there's multiple servers. I know it can be a rough point for new users, but most people can just join whatever the largest server is and they'll be perfectly fine. You need to pick a server because lemmy isn't one website, and it shouldn't be one website. People should be able to host an instance if they disagree with another one's moderation/rules, and spreading the load across many servers helps to prevent large scale downtime when servers go down. All of these advantages can coexist with new users just being pointed to lemmy.world.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 58 minutes ago

This post can be taken as-is with "Lemmy" replaced with "Linux", and I fucking hate it. So many people despise the idea of "normies" coming to what they love as if they're the reason things got so bad. This stuff could be so great if they were actually made for everyone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

While humanity can be incredible and beautiful to look at from a distance...
Humans, tend to fucking suck.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Good UI (in my android app) is the reason I came to Lemmy.

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