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?
Good.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
962 points (92.0% liked)
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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.
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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.
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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.
This is why I like SomethingAwful forums too. Open since 1999 and an account costs $10. Just a little barrier to entry keeps out the worst people and trolls help fund the site by reregistering!
The less profitable we are, the less they'll bother us.
The closer we are to irrelevance, the farther we are from harm!
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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.
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] can help
- "Top Day / 12 hours/ 6 hours" works better than Hot
- "New comments " works better than Active
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.
Ah yes, the US is being run by a fascist pedophile and his 4 techbros of the apocalypse, but lets focus on the tankies because clearly they are the real problem haha.
Tankies promoted that fascist pedophile, literally promoted him on Hexbear and praised him, and regularly promote both-sides-bad centrism that empowers him.
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.
whatever, just make a lemmy app that defaults to lemmy.world i guess
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.
Bad choice, many new users specifically came here because of [email protected], which can't be accessed from lemmy.world.
i would guess the piracy audience doesn't struggle with the same problems that would make a default instance useful
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.
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
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. 😔
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.
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.
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.