- Exclude explicit software bugginess or missing features
- Include experiences or knock-on effects that may have arisen from (1)
- Comparisons to Reddit are ok. We know the reasons for the differences, but this is just about expressing yourself
As a general rule, the onboarding and discovery in the fediverse is pretty bloody terrible.
It has to exist to be terrible.
I don’t have anywhere to discuss reality TV bullshit now :( Reddit was good for that. I just want to know if Charity sent the right guy home tonight and I haven’t found a community for that yet.
Its just super unattractive to join. If I am thinking about joining a platform I want to know if there is content that is interesting to me. Now if I go to https://join-lemmy.org/ what do I see? It greets me with explanations of the Licensing, tells me all the programming languages and frameworks, shows me pictures of code and something about mod tools and of course immediately offers me to run my own server. None of that is even remotely interesting to me even now that I am a registered user. Not to mention that the design is questionable. Then it says “Join a server”. I am not here to join a server, I am here to join a platform. And if I click on that I am met with about 50 different instances, of which I have no idea what to choose and what implications my choice has.
The whole federation thing, the design, everything is just unintuitive and unattractive to join.
I agree that it is unclear to folks that Lemmy is not a platform and this causes frustration and disappointment for new users. It probably should be clearer on join-lemmy.org that this whole thing is just a bunch of servers talking to each other.
It’s absolutely a platform, it’s just not centralized.
I tried to solve this a tiny little bit by giving my own instance a clean and friendly frontpage, but I think I still need to do more work to attract people who aren’t fedi-inclined.
join-lemmy.org needs some serious work if it’s really what people are going to link when others ask about it; it’s really no wonder that we’ve mostly only amassed technical folks. I also think the default UI/UX could use a lot of work to bring it up to standards with other modern social sites. I wish that would be a priority for the devs, but I know they only have so much time to devote to things
Can make this argument for email…
Which is why no one is running their own email server and people go to the platform that is easiest and most well known.
Email has the benefit of legacy. Lemmy does not.
I want the app to open to frontpage, aka only the communities I subscribed to, sorted by New. I want it to take zero clicks to get here; I just want to open the app and have it there.
Apps are updating rapidly of course, but the last time I went through the main Lemmy apps on Android, the best one still took two clicks to get to my preferred view every time I close and relaunched the app.
You cn do this by changing your account settings.
Onboarding is unclear for people. So if they just Google Lemmy it’s a bit of a adventure for them to figure out they have to make an account where to make the account.
The friction around account creation is difficult. Many let me instances require manual approval, so that slows down me onboarding funnel.
Let’s be Frank most people don’t want to make an account, entering email and password and validation. Using some federated identity like Google Apple would make The onboarding easier for people
Discovery is very difficult, especially if you’re on a smaller instance, you have to know what communities to individually subscribe to. There’s some mitigations with find a Lemmy community websites but they’re not built into most of the apps yet. So unless you’re joining a very large server, Lemmy’s going to feel pretty empty.
There’s some gaps between Lemmy and other platforms around media rich posts, especially videos and GIFs. Posting a video on Lemmy is difficult especially if you’re on a mobile device.
I still love Lemmy, these are just observations with respect to your query
For me, you can’t separate those two things. I want an online identity. I don’t want to switch servers because of whatever reason and have to import bookmarks. I want my app to keep track of my subscriptions and just give me my replies/messages. I don’t want to care whether I’m on lemmy.ml or whatever
Have my upvote good sir/madam/other. Use it in good health!
I don’t like all the communities that moved from Reddit that are just using bots to cross post shit from Reddit to here. All those communities seem to have are the bot posts. I’m not commenting to a bot; it won’t respond. I don’t know how many humans would see it, because literally no content is posted by a human. I post my own content, but then it’s buried by the bot spamming stolen content.
I get the idea was to seed the community and make it appear active, but it just has the opposite effect. If I was to block the bot as I usually do because I don’t care to engage with bot content, that community would be dead. At the very least, hide the fact it’s a bot and make me believe it’s a human I’m talking to.
One thing I’ve noticed that I feel might become an issue eventually is that occasionally someone will have something they really want to be seen, so they sort of cross-post it to every related community in every instance they can all at the same time, so it shows up in your feed a dozen times from a dozen different places and it takes sometimes a day or more to get fully pushed out of the way.
I’ve only seen it happen a few times so far so it’s not currently a major issue, but I can definitely see the potential for abuse there. As more people join you’ll inevitably start to get more of the marketers and influencers and eventually corporations showing up, and they tend to bring all their bots and tools and various ways of gaming the system so it’d suck if the whole feed ends up being just the same 3-4 things posted into dozens of places for the whole day.
I’m sure there are ways to filter those sorts of things out, but I think the challenge is going to be to find a way to keep it under control without putting too much on the user, so they don’t have to be constantly tweaking their settings and blocklists, and so that new users who just browse without having an account yet don’t just see an unappealing wall of nonsense.
Hopefully that doesn’t end up being the case, but that seems to be the way it trends when you add more people in my experience.
Yeah this has to be my number one criticism at the moment. It’s a bit of a catch 22: you want a steady stream of quality content, so you subscribe to multiple communities of the same name so nothing falls through the cracks, and then posters post to multiple related or same-named communities so nobody misses it 🤷♂️
Discovering communities is easily the #1 complaint, I don’t think it’s a technical issue, it feels mostly a conceptual issue with how everything works. I understand why duplicate communities exist because of how the Fediverse works, but in practice it’s pretty annoying to the users. For example I tried to look for an anime community just to see if there’s any discussion, but I had no idea where people were.
There’s anime@lemmy.ml, this looks like the most popular but it’s mostly repost bots. There’s anime@lemmy.world and ani_me@lemmy.world, both of which barely have users. There’s anime@kbin.social, which has some threads going on but few users.
Because of the amount of duplicates nobody knows where the users actually are. Since everyone’s confused, nobody participates because they feel like nobody else is going to see their content. On Reddit you had one definitive subreddit for each topic, on Lemmy it feels like a guessing game at times which one’s the right one.
We’re settling into communities more as time goes on (like how !moviesandtv@lemmy.film is the definitive movie/tv hub), but I think we’ve got a ways to go. If Lemmy wants to go more mainstream it needs to tackle this, whether it’s through multi-reddit style communities that combines feeds or some way to combine comments on crossposts or maybe some other way.
Yes, the world fracturing creates a bunch of duplicate islands. They need to overlap.
Wow. All the top comments are about finding / joining / onboarding.
It’s just super unattractive to join.
Discovering communities is easily the #1 complaint
Onboarding is unclear for peopleI genuinely don’t understand this criticism about the fediverse. It seems like people just want to be told what to do. I totally understand that this isn’t a vertical platform like Reddit or Twitter but that doesn’t prevent anyone from participating in the platform. It just means that you need to look for what you’re interested in rather than be told what you should be interested in.
Multiple communities with the same theme in diverse servers mean lots of repeated information in my home page.
I’ve commented recently about the redundancy of communities - which I think is a related criticism to knowing what community to join (as opposed to instance). If I’m on this instance but another instance has a community of the same name, which should I join? Both? Meh. It’s not something to stand in the way of using the platform at all but it is a bit annoying.
Anyway, my one “complaint” is just that the niche communities I’m a member of on Reddit don’t exist here. Specifically, communities for buying and trading things like r/photomarket.
This is still a relatively new platform. It’s going to take some time for it to build itself organically. It feels to me that a measurable amount of content on the platform is critiquing the platform. I think it would be more conducive if we all spent less time critiquing and more time generating original content - not stuff cross-posted from other platforms. I mean, in general, if you’re searching the web for “a thing”, the results aren’t going to direct you to the fediverse unless you’re specifically searching about something regarding the fediverse. Showing up in search results might be the tipping point that drives more users to join the platform.
It seems like people just want to be told what to do.
Yes exactly. Not many people like to figure out how something works, they just want it to work.
Apple’s success isn’t because it’s the best at any individual feature. It’s successful because All the features just work without having to figure anything out.
Wow. All the top comments are about finding / joining / onboarding.
Then it’s a solid complaint. A quick story as to why you don’t understand it: I use to do tech support and I’d hear so many coworkers get super frustrated about how stupid the people calling in were, because they couldn’t even do…whatever the thing was. I would make a point to the new hires that they knew how to do this stuff because they’re techies, because this is what they grew up learning. The doctor or lawyer or professor on the other end of the call is not stupid whatsoever…in fact, they’re likely much smarter than the person calling them stupid, they just took a different path. The techie is unable to fathom that the depth of their own technical knowledge is not common knowledge whatsoever and takes the basics for granted. At its core is an inability to see one’s self as more than a standard deviation from the norm. Cheers.
Loads more unnecessary and weird political comments on completely unrelated posts. On Reddit it depended much more on the subreddit whether you’ll get those weird comments, on Lemmy I found lots of comments up high on various non-political communities which just repeat certain political combat slogans on many posts.
Even when I sympathize with ‘that side’ moreso than the opposite one, it’s just dumb and annoying to me.
As an old, I just realized why the time I spend on Lemmy is less soul-destroying than equivalent time on Reddit.
I enjoy searching for topics of interest more than being spoonfed content. So in this respect, the difficulty of Lemmy is the point.
I get it that this is an aging hipster point of view, so really we are fighting for the soul of Lemmy.
How much appeal do we really want?
How fast do we want to grow?
What order should major features be implemented in? (Let alone the debate over which features.)
This debate will never end. Get used to the defederation wars. It is akin to “Am I my brother’s keeper”? This is among the first questions asked in Genesis and God declined to answer. We will fight about it till the end of time.
My best hope is that enough quality instances host quality communities that I can curate my own experience to make so-called social media serve me, not a tech company.
I thought that was the point?
Join us at lemmy.world/c/tinnedseafood! Or is it !tinnedseafood. But don’t I need the instance too? This is part of the problem!
This is a feature, not a bug. Yes you need the instance as well as the community name. This is akin to complaining that you can’t type in a URL without including the TLD (*.com, *.org, *.wtevs).
I am open to an explanation how you can expect to find a community without both pieces of information. There may be a less confusing way to structure the links, but the community name and instance name are basically required for a federated system.
The “front page” of lemmy, either the local of the instance you’re on or the “all”, is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I’m not sure what the issue is with lemmy’s front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?
It’s too bad because the “front page” is the user’s first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.
In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.
The front page of Reddit is one of the places I’ve actively avoided. That’s the place where I’ll find everything that the rest of the world likes to see, but none of the stuff that I care about. I tend to be interested in strange niche topics, and my multireddits reflected that quite clearly. To me, the front page of Lemmy is about as boring as the front page of Reddit, so no big changes there.
Yeh for the last few years especially of my using Reddit I would only ever go directly to the 4-5 subs that I frequented. Never once went to the home page/“all”, or the new discover page or whatever it is.
For now I’m using All on here to try and find some communities to join, and which ones to block. I’d say in a few months I’ll just be using Subscribed.
In order to discover interesting places I just went to https://lemmyverse.net/communities and joined every community with an interesting name, such as science, technology, physics etc.
I strongly agree that it needs to improve. Besides the sorting algorithm issues, one issue is that “all” depends on what people on your instance have subscribed to. So small instances might not have much or have a very biased all. I think Lemmy should at least default to basically subscribing to the N biggest communities for all instances, purely to seed the “all” view.
As well, most instances should default to “all”, because “local” is usually going to be extremely limited and misleading. Defaulting to local will just make the fediverse look bad. New users aren’t going to realize they can switch to all. They’ll just think there’s barely any content and leave.
Some sorting would be good. I’d also like to be able to hide posts without having to block the poster. Right now there is very little user control.
Lemmy has no algorithm.
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That’s not really what I was referring to. Sure it selects posts automatically but it’s not like it picks what it thinks a specific user is going to click on.
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The same problem I have when it comes to Mastodon/Misskey/Firefish - I feel like everything is so fragmented, like I have to jump from one place to another. Thankfully, this applies significantly less in the “threadiverse” (Outdated name, we definitely need a new one) because there aren’t 6 different platforms and tens of different forks, and Lemmy and Kbin are pretty much 100% compatible with one another, unlike those moments where you can’t see Mastodon re-toots on Firefish a lot of the time or sometimes accounts’ posts appear much later in a different instance. We don’t need to worry about that here.
On one hand, I kind of like that there are separate communities to check up on. It’s a very efficient way to waste time.
Links between instances often don’t work as intended, and there’s no good way to redirect me from
some-other-instance.pub/c/cool-communitytomy-instance.pub/c/cool-community@some-other-instance.pubautomatically.You should check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fediredirect/. This works for redirecting both communities and posts, although the latter requires to give your log in credentials to the extension.
Looks nice. Some us browse on mobile though.
I also mainly browse on mobile haha. However loading posts from my home instance is often taken care of by the app (client).
