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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?
I assumed (probably incorrectly) that users would be visiting Lemmy via apps, so the UX would depend on which app they used.
I don't know. I have a soft spot for Lemmy. The interactions here seem more genuine less about updoots.
https://old.lemmy.world/ looks just like reddit. It's not the UI. It's network effect and there's not a lot to be done.
People are still on Twitter while the owner makes Nazi salutes and Bluesky is a 1:1 replacement feature-wise with a modern interface. People just don't like to move.
The vast majority of users don't like the old.reddit view, else reddit would have that as default.
Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it 'wars'.
As for UX, there's definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstance without explicitly subbing to them all or using lemmyverse.net.
But I don't think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.
If that was a legitimate issue, MMO's (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn't have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.
Even if Lemmy was one big simple centralized server, that user would just come up with another reason they couldn't switch.
"Oh, it's too small, my niche communities aren't there"
"The UI isn't as nice"
"The mod tools aren't as good"
Etc.
I'm not getting what the UX problems are, and if you change things aren't there just going to be new problems with the changes? I think the default experience is a lot better than Reddit at least.
It might not be a bad experience for you, but it's a bad experience for what looks like the vast majority of people. Don't take my word for it, look at the hundreds of upvotes in the post I shared.
It's on a Bluesky community, there's a serious bias in those votes
it's ok, it's a filter
I disagree. I'm an ex tech guy, and I found it to be a pain in the ass. I really appreciate everything that everyone here does, but it's empty enough that I recognize a number of users. The average person isn't signing up. At 50k active users, our voice is small.
I don't know what the grand vision is, but if it's to provide the people with a corporate free perform, there needs to be... The People.
Do you really want mass appeal right now? Just be patient, build good information and ppl will come
We already have good information, the barrier to entry just needs to be lowered
Lemmy has good UI, the defaults set are just bad and most people will give up before discovering Photon etc.
Something like https://phtn.app/ really should be the default
If the UI is the problem, the lemmy devs are working on a more modern looking UI using daisyUI atm.
Agreed. I really like the default UI personally but I know it's not exactly the most new-user-friendly and modern. There is also tesseract: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/communities/lemmy.world
It's all here ? https://phtn.app/_app/immutable/assets/0.CzFg6cYp.css
A theme chooser like misskey allows to do, should'nt be that complicated
Something like https://phtn.app/ really should be the default
Disclaimer: Photon is great and the dev does a fantastic job. Also, the beta is open, please give them feedback on [email protected]
However, there as still issues induced by not using the default UI. One of the instances I used added photon as p.instance for a while
Photon was still in early stages, and there was a bug preventing it to load for some people (Firefox users IIRC). In the end the admin switched to Tesseract.
https://lemdro.id/ has photon as a Default, but it took them a while to the latest version, for quite some time it wasn't ideal. I would still go to https://l.lemdro.id/ just because the Comments view was available, or because some other info was missing/hidden.
Lemmy releases new versions quite regularly, and there are usually a few bugs. Photon development is independent, and the Photon dev has to catch-up with those. Add admins sometimes limited availability to the mix and the experience can really become subpar.
There's quite a few things we can do to improve the experience in the current default.
Eg. by optimising it's defaults, turning 'Auto expand media' on makes it a much smoother transition for people, and makes the site look more modern and not like a forum from 15 years ago.
The reality is, our UX is bad else top comments in the post I shared wouldn't look like that, and something needs to be done about it
What proportion of the potential new joiners are going to use the web UI compared to an app like Sync, Thunder or Arctic?
Not many I'm assuming. I like pointing people to Voyager because it's both on android and apple, and it has a very smooth UX, you can install and start scrolling
My message is often something like
` Checkout Lemmy, it's a solid reddit alternative. https://phtn.app/
If you want a mobile app: https://vger.app/settings/install `
Be careful that IIRC Reddit blocked the phtn URL and would automatically remove comments mentioning it.
Not sure if it's still the case now, but just a warning.
Unless we fix the UX problems in Lemmy, a Bluesky-like alternative of reddit is going to pop up, and overtake Lemmy, like what happened with Mastadon
Text-based forums are a niche. The vast majority of the population doesn't like that format. There's a reason no Bluesky has emerged, the appeal is just not there.
About Bluesky, there was an app that allowed "Reddit view" (so threads with votes). Can't find it back right now, the search mostly show Flashes, the Instagram alternative, which probably reflects the larger interest for that type of format.
Agreed. But as long as people don't actively leave Lemmy in favor of the new service I'd be okay with it I guess. I mean it would still be cool if Lemmy grew larger but hey, we got a nice little community here