Fediverse

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.

Yep. I came, couldn't get into it, https://lemmy.world/post/1388830 and unfortunately went back to Reddit.

Kind of wishing for a light mode. I like to keep things light during the day, and dark at night. Crazy right?

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.

"bad ux? bad ui?" i am a graphic designer!!! i only use linux and open source software like inkscape!! yea let's go!! fediverse

Fully agree with that, the bar is too to high usually unless you're being handheld through the process, realistically there should be an app like how blue sky is that doesn't give you any of the options because less options means easier setup. If they want to jump instances after that that would be considered an advanced function but they can choose to do so on their own accord.

Another issue I think is lack of actual awareness, like Bsky got media coverage, the everyday person still is like "the hells a lemmy"

I would hundred percent agree with that! Lemmy we need a app/website with a better UI

Lots of Lemmy clients have great UI. The default web interface looks fine as well.

Wait till they try out Matrix. No client works properly and all the mobile clients are really bad.

We could stop bullying .ml users for being .ml users. That's the only "war" I have seen here.

And they don't have to join. I really don't mean this in a dismissive way and respect their opinion. But why all this worrying about the need to have the fediverse dominate all social media? Maybe it's meant to be this way: your vibe decides your tribe. My vibe isn't commercial, toxic political talk, or influencers, thus my tribe is the fediverse instead of IG or Tiktok.

To the guy in here going "UX != UI!!!" Sure, but you can't design UX, especially for the unwashed masses. "Tried cutting toenails with lawnmower; severed foot. 0/10 bad user experience."

Lemmy has a "have our cake and eat it too" problem. It offers two mutually exclusive promises:

• Each instance is its own independent self-contained little Reddit with their own communities, culture, code of conduct etc. so that individuals can find a place that suits them or make one if none is available, and

• All the servers are part of one great big federated system where all users have access to content on all instances so it doesn't matter which instance you sign up for, you can access it all.

In practice, the former is more or less true, the latter really isn't.

First there's the obvious topic of defederation, which makes the "join one server, access all of them" an outright lie. On the one hand, I think everyone here will agree this platform requires defederation to function so that we can kick out instances like lolli.rape or whatever, which thank you admins and mods for dealing with. But what about Hexbear, or Truth Social (which as I understand it is running on Mastodon software). The only honest answer to "where do we draw that line?" is "somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there."

It is intellectually dishonest to say that Lemmy has this problem and Reddit doesn't. Post in r/mensrights and an automod bans you from r/twoxchromosomes. Do basically anything anywhere on the platform and get banned from r/conservative. They managed to implement "It's a different platform depending on who you are" on a monolithic service.

All that crap aside, the average user has a more limited perspective on the rest of the fediverse than his home instance. Often, the UI defaults to viewing only local posts, you have to tell it to give you a global feed. You can browse a list of your local communities, you can browse a list of global communities, you can't browse a list of communities on a given foreign instance. 'Show me everything on lemmy.sports' or indeed 'show me a list of communities on lemmy.nsfw.' You cannot create (or moderate?) communities on instances you aren't a member of. It is, if only slightly, easier to participate on your home instance than elsewhere.

Either your choice of server does matter, or it doesn't.

If it does matter, we shouldn't have so many general purpose instances, it should be lemmy.music and lemmy.art and lemmy.uk. Then newcomers are presented a meaningful choice. Are you mostly interested in discussions pertaining to your country? Your hobby? Your career? Sign up here to mostly participate in that, and no matter which you pick you can visit the rest of the Lemmyverse, too."

If it doesn't matter, then design it such that instances are entirely transparent to users; eliminate the possibility of [email protected] and [email protected] coexisting, and make all instances lemmy1.world lemmy2.world, issue credentials centrally and then just spread the load in the background.

I don't think you can have both at the same time.

Well, when I started to use lemmy I had a few problems:

1. I read something on the landing page about "Mastodon account works too" so tried that, so basically confused fediverse, activitypub, mastodon and lemmy and wondered why nothing worked. Oops.
2. I tried to join a community that was meant to migrate away from reddit, but found two duplicates. So I wasn't sure which one was the correct one. Ultimately the migration failed, even though it was a software oriented community
3. Then I soon wanted to make a new account on a server that doesn't require an email. Because emails today are basically personally identifiable for security agencies.
4. Then I found out that socialists are called tankies on lemmy and some of the main socialist instances are banned by the limbrols. So I made a new account and posted a little and had an interesting discussion about voting in proto-fascist democracies and promptly got banned by the tankies. Oh well.
5. Then I had a discussion about how calling russian people "orcs" is racist. You guessed it, banned.
6. Well several accounts later, here I am, the last sane man on the internet and you all fucking suck hahaha

I do think lemmy is worthwhile and can be fun, but as a reddit alternative it has already failed. You cannot purge insanity by splitting it up into smaller insanlets. That's just schizophrenia.

Good.