Fediverse

Uh yeah. I’ve got no clue how to find new communities? Instances? Groups? Whatever the hell the equivalent of a subreddit is called. It’s not user friendly at all.

If you mention Lemmy, point someone towards a specific instance so it's not so much of a shock. Then they can slowly learn about what it is.

I'll be ditching reddit completely after 16th of April. Till then I'm slowly doing my migration. Lemmy is awesome.

That happened to me in the reddit exodus, I switched to Lemmy and faced a lot of analysis paralysis, ended up in Lemmy.world out of spite and then I regretted my decision.

So yeah, in my experience it's bad UX design, it felt like gatekeeping tbh.

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...

I am very new here, and not as passionate about the fediverse as some of you are (like your average redditor most likely).

Reading the comments here I think that the fact that you notice decentralization as a user can be a problem for many but offering simple instance lists, community lists in the UI can mitigate that and make it more a feature than a nuisance (for those that have trouble navigating it).

On desktop, I don't mind switching servers with different URLs, especially since I can read them all with the same proton UI. However, on mobile (I spend more time on social media via mobile than desktop, I imagine most people do these days) using the Jerboa app I cannot figure out how to "visit" another server. I can't enter the URL, I cannot click on the URL, I cannot search for @URL and get a list of the communities hosted on it..

I am sure there is documentation somewhere explaining how I achieve this, but I should not have to look for that just to acces different instances. I use lemmy on breaks mostly and as I said, am not passionate enough about social media to read manpages for it.. I imagine some will think "then we don't need people like you here", but in the end if close-to mainstream user adoption is a goal, you kind of will need people who just want to look at cats and discover communities as well, and making jumping between instances and finding communities is an important part of making that happen.

Edit: I do not think having an official sign up is a solutiom btw, I think different servers are neat, and I most likely will sign up to another I am more in line with when I know which are available. It is neat to choose a home server, but it should be seemless to find others. There is no need to obfuscate servers and pretend everything is centralized, but having easy access to a centralized list of servers and communities built into the UI seems like a must for me.

1. The apps are kinda meh. I haven't found one that doesn't come with significant disadvantages yet, and I've tried FIVE.

2. There's no recommendations feed. You see what you're subscribed to, or everything. No in-between. You can't see what you've subscribed to, and a few posts that the algorithm thinks you might like. People like to complain about the algorithm, but one reason it's so addictive is that it's useful.

3. Notifications don't work in every app

4. Just having a feed that behaves normally seems to be really hard to do for apps. Stop slowing me posts I've already scrolled past, and when I click home/pull down to refresh, I want new posts, not the same thing again that I've already scrolled past and ignored. Some apps have settings (that are somehow not on by default) to hide read posts and mark posts read on scroll, but I haven't tried an app where that works every time.

5. There's no "main" app. Think about Reddit before the API fees. There used to be a default app. It had its issues, but most features worked out of the box, and most things were intuitive and normie-friendly. You could use that to get comfortable with the social network itself, and then eventually try other apps when something got too annoying.

   Compare that with Lemmy. You want to try it, and you already have to deal with choice paralysis. A ton of apps on the website, with utterly unhelpful descriptions ("an open-source Lemmy client developed by so-and-so"; wow, exactly zero of those words help me pick) and a random order that doesn't even let me default to one most popular one.

   Quite a few apps focus on niche UI features like swipe-based navigation while still not having the basics down right. I'm several months into having joined Lemmy and I still haven't found an app that feels somewhat right. That is a challenge not one of the other social networks has managed. Congrats, Lemmy. Impressive.

6. Picking a server and signing up in general is complicated. And it's an impactful decision that you have NO tools to make so early, unless you start researching like it's school homework.

   .world? That's popular but you'll be judged for having joined it, plus you lose access to the piracy community. .ml? Hope you like communists and DRAMA. And if you get it wrong, there's no intuitive and easy way to migrate. You clunkily export your settings and re-import them; the servers will NOT talk to each other. And even then you lose some stuff.

   This UX issue is tough. I don't have an easy solution. But I'm sure a UX expert could find one.

7. Manual validation of your sign-up by a human. What is this, a Facebook group? If you introduce a 24-hour delay so early in the process, of course people are going to fall off.

8. The mouse logo is kinda ugly, won't lie. I'm sure it's a more potent people repellent than you think.

9. There is a LOT of tribalism. On Reddit, there's r/Canada, that's full of convinced conservatives that won't hesitate to artificially skew the discourse. And there's r/OnGuardForThee, basically the same but with progressives angry at the conservatives.

   On Lemmy, that feels like the rule, not the exception. I just joined communities based on my interests, and my feed is full of communist vs communist vs non-communist drama. Can we frickin' chill?

   If I need to start filtering out whole fields of interest that were taken over, joining less popular community clones or literally defederating instances to get a good experience, we've got it wrong. Normal people don't wanna do that when they literally just got here. They'll just leave.

10. Somehow even more US-centric than Reddit. So... Much... American politics.