In other places on around the web, (chiefly /r/RedditAlternatives) whenever Lemmy is brought up, invariably I see the exact same complaints from brand new accounts.
Lemmy is too complicated, it wont gain traction, can’t figure out how to use it, can’t log in, etc.
Now, I’m definitely more tech savvy than the average redditor, but I just don’t see the complaints. You can go to any Lemmy site, instantly start doomscrolling with a familiar UI, and sign up on all the instances I’ve tried has been frankly more simple than making a new reddit account. The only real complaint I have is the generally smaller volume of users and posts.
My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.
Ideally, the first link someone sees when googling Lemmy would be a global feed on a fairly generic instance, with a basic tagline akin to ‘front page of the internet.’ End users don’t need to care about the technical details, at least not until they’re interested in the platform.
So is this “Lemmy is too confusing” sentiment even real? And if not, what motive would there be to astroturf this?
If it is a real issue affecting would-be users, how can we address it?
The fediverse is too complicated which I said in detail on my post on c/fediverse currently its a mess each domain has hundreds of different sites that aren’t interconnected and where you need to create a new account on each. If Lemmy had a front page like reddit and allowed for all its smaller communities to be coded and personalized to be completely different while allowing the top 25 posts every 24 hours to pop up and allowing a place to search for a specific community. We could still allow an approval process for specific communities but reddit would fall in months with how mods at reddit currently behave
Tip for you since it sounds you are genuinely trying it out but are running into issues: you can post and comment on outside Lemmy communities without creating a different account for the most part. Just navigate to lemmy.world/c/[community name]@[other site domain]. Example: https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected] means you can interact with the community on mander.xyz while staying on your lemmy.world account.
A Lemmy server agnostic link can be made in the form of ![community name]@[other site domain]. Example: [email protected], or [email protected] to help people from anywhere on lemmy to link to c/fediverse.
There’s still a lot of gaps like official methods to redirect post and comment links to your instance (I heard it was coming soon) It is indeed behind Reddit in a lot of technical and social aspects, but I think it’s not completely a bad thing.
Maybe, but I believe in Occam’s razer. The simplest solution is probably correct.
The average user is incredibly lazy. Insanely lazy. Reddit has taught them that they should be just spoonfed content constantly with no assistance. People aren’t used to going out to find communities anymore. To them even these basic concepts are then “frustrating” and “complex”. It’s unfortunate, but that’s really how lazy they are.
They can’t go to the search bar, type in television, and hit subscribe, it’s literally too much for them.
I think you described short form video like reels, tiktok, shorts users as well perfectly.
People are ready for alternatives to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook… Can a community on reddit shutdown, and seamlessly transfer to lemmy within a few days while archiving the subreddits history? Will the new Lemmy be hands off moderation at the site level so that conversation can be had? If you can give people a yes to both people will join.
Sure, but the complaints I see are never “I don’t see content there that I like”, it’s always “its too complicated and I can’t sign up/see content at all”
but if you make it to any Lemmy site, you’re right there on the home feed instantly, same as reddit.
So is it really a problem of users not even making it to an instance? Are they really all getting brick-walled by join-lemmy.org, or is something else going on here?
Also, Lemmy has ways of discovering communities. Just browse the all-local or all-federated feeds and you’ll see what communities are popular.
The “can’t sign up” complaints might have something to do with how most instances make you answer questions like “why do you want to sign up” and “what communities will you browse” as a simple way of stopping automated sign-ups, and if they didn’t put anything in the box or just said things like “IDK I’m from Reddit” they might have been rejected due to the admins thinking they’re a bot or spammer or something.
Gonna throw in my personal conspiracy theory (that I don’t have any evidence for): I haven’t been on Reddit Alternatives since I found Lemmy, but based on what i remember, there seem to be quite a few people who have spun up their own projects and are promoting them pretty hard on that subreddit. Who’s to say if one or more of them decided to buy bot comments to smear their competitors?
Yeah, that’s the type of motive I was struggling to find. I could absolutely see that happening.
There is an increasing difficulty to even find out that join-lemmy.org exists.
To be fair join-lemmy.org also is a rather awful bit of user onboarding. It’s very much a programmer design. Which is something all of Lemmy suffers from.
There’s fine line between a good design, and over simplification. But Lemmy is pretty firmly a mile away playing in the “it works” pool.
I think a good chunk of them are just confused by going to join-lemmy and not be given a sign up in their face. Sure, we know that about 5 seconds of reading comprehension skill would get them where they want to go, but the vast majority of users don’t have that. Look how many people will walk up to a cash register/till with a sign on it that says “credit card only” and then be confused that they don’t take cash. Most people don’t read anymore.
My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.
The thing is, that’s a fundamental feature of Lemmy. It’s designed such that no one person or company controls the whole thing. Admins that have differing opinions can each have their own servers with whatever rules they want.
That makes it somewhat incompatible with a a basic signup page like what you’re proposing, just like you can’t have a generic “sign up for email” page without picking a specific provider. Having a huge number of users on a single server somewhat defeats the purpose of decentralization - you’re back to a small number of people / a company having control over a major part of the ecosystem.
Perhaps it could redirect people to a randomly selected instance from a hand-picked list, but maybe that’d be even more confusing? I’m not sure.
Realistically the solution would be instances moving away from the Lemmy ‘brand’. You could more easily direct users to a specific one and fast track newbies past all the fediverse details.
If we go with the email analogy, people rarely ever search for ‘email’, they just go to the specific ones they know. Then searching for lemmy gets you to places like join-lemmy.org that cares about the ecosystem, while terms analogous to gmail directs you more to a specific instance.
And I think this sort of branding model actually more compatible with the idea of decentralization. As a culture, I think we would better serve federation by directly linking and promoting our preferred instances, rather than harping on about federation and the lemmyverse.
If we go with the email analogy, people rarely ever search for ‘email’, they just go to the specific ones they know.
I get it, but everyone going to gmail is not a good thing and never has been. The paradigm shift is more meaningful than simply growing lemmy as a community. Without that, the only difference from a mainstream social network today would be a handful of big players rather than just one.
Realistically the solution would be instances moving away from the Lemmy ‘brand’
This is a great idea, and I think some instances do this. I seem to remember Beehaw taking this approach. Similar to forums - each forum has a different name even if they use the same software.
The tricky part for regular users to understand is that if they sign up on one server, they can still access content on others. Old-school internet users thay used to use Usenet would understand it (Usenet functioned the same way) but the majority of users are used to centralized services these days, which makes it hard.
Source?
What are you, a cop?
I just want to see what the OP is talking about without having to browse reddit myself.
How dare someone ask for something like… facts and evidence.
My anti-lemmy sentiment comes from raw experience like dumbfuck comments and witnessing the extent of ACAB brainrot.
Okay, well you know where the exit is.
I’m probably the least tech savvy person on Lemmy. If my dumb ass can figure it out, the subset of Reddit’s population who we’d actually want in Lemmy’s community should have no problem.
That said, onboarding could have been better, and you’re right about the potential hangups: “fediverse” sounds like some kind of federal government function like a hub website that links to all the different .gov agencies, and “Lemmy” sounds like a cartoon character. Choosing an instance was more stressful than it probably should have been; ultimately went with .world by blindly following the advice of a YouTube video, but on day 1 I was pretty oblivious to the extremist shit that’s associated with instances like .ml and had no clue what ‘tankie’ even meant.
That was two years ago though - no idea of that reflects what getting started is like today.
And again, that’s all coming from a relatively tech-dumbass, so I’d imagine it’s probably smoother for people less prone to starting a fire when they their computer turns on.
Has not changed one bit. If anything the onboarding experience has gotten worse.
Lemmy isnt new user hostile so to speak but it sure doesn’t try not to be.
And God, the number of times iv had to explain that frediverse doesn’t have anything to do with the feds is insane.
Lemmy has some of the worse terminology.
I have no idea what the instances even are, I didn’t realize it mattered, I just picked one at random. I still have no idea what they are or why it matters
And it’s okay! No need to understand those at first
If you’re interested, the short version is that instances (A.K.A servers) are run by different people in different places. A reason to move instances might be:
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My admin, the owner of the instance, has been doing things I heavily disagree with (bans, blocks, etc)
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I don’t agree with the rules on my instance.
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The instance is run in a country which criminalizes something that I care about, and so has to ban discussion of that thing (piracy, porn, etc).
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I want to run a community on a specific instance for whatever reason, and so need an account there
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I have zero tech skills and I’m here I do think the emails back and forth to get my original log in was obnoxious, it literally took days, and I have no idea how to start communities, I have no idea what the “federation” is, I don’t understand “instances” and I really do miss Reddit for how easy all those things are but I figure eventually I’ll get it and this will feel like home. If all you want to do is make an account to scroll it’s pretty easy but I do agree everything else is hard/obnoxious and it will definitely slow down growth. That said I was on reddit since almost the beginning and growing quickly only came in the past several years and it really destroyed the site, so growing slowly isn’t inherently a bad thing. I do wish there was simple videos to watch on things like how to make a community though
Hmm, good idea, is there a ‘newtolemmy’ community?
Actually there is
When I first signed up here, or tried to sign up here, join-lemmy just didn’t want to load anything. So I ended up going to bed and trying again the next morning. The next morning, it finally loaded the list of instances and going by the experience I had just had with the website battling to even load anything, I chose an instance advertised as “join here to reduce load on larger instances”. And this instance just didn’t want to load anything properly. Half of the images in posts just weren’t showing up. And when I searched LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, only dead communities showed up and I’m pretty sure nothing from Blåhaj.
Then I went to world and still found it to be a ghost town. Eventually I realised that it was because ‘English’ wasn’t selected in my language settings. Because I didn’t realise that you have to ctrl click to select both ‘undefined’ and ‘English’. I’ve used software where you have to ctrl click but I’m not sure I’ve ever come across another website where this is the case. And on this note, the whole fact that ‘undefined’ even exists as an option comes across as bush league and makes it look like a beta version.
Then there’s another issue here. The god damn internal politics. So someone signs up on the insurance that says “focused on programming and development”, then have everyone calling them a tankie or be cut off from multiple instances that have de-federated. It’s clear to me now that ‘ml’ stands for “Marxist Leninist” but when you’re new here and just looking at descriptions in join-lemmy, it just looks like a unique url like all the others.
Personally I think there’s a lot of reasons that people would give up trying to get started here. That’s before even trying to break them ice with a silly question in AskLemmy and getting snarky snark and smart asses in the replies. And I use that as an example because in my first week here, I saw someone post an innocent question in AskLemmy, get hostility as a response, then leave.
The English + Undefined issue is indeed a nasty issue that makes half of the content disappear for a reason that’s not easy to figure out. It really should be a separate checkbox of whether to show or hide posts where the language is not labelled. I do think that Undefined is selected by default now, but might still get unselected if the language setting is clicked and changed.
For those people saying “Ctrl+Click, should be obvious”, that won’t work at all on mobile web UI.
I’ve used software where you have to ctrl click but I’m not sure I’ve ever come across another website where this is the case
This is the standard behaviour on the web for lists where you can select multiple options. See the example here for instance: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/select#advanced_select_with_multiple_features
Most sites have a custom version though, since the built-in HTML element has such a poor user experience. I really wish browsers would just switch it to be a list with checkboxes.
The behaviour was based on Windows desktop apps in the 90s (where this behaviour was way more common), but after a while, most things switched to checkbox lists instead.
The behaviour was based on Windows desktop apps in the 90s
Ah, so that’s why it was chosen as the default here.
Yeah I don’t think the multi-select listboxes have really changed much since the days of Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape Navigator. Out of all the standard form components you can use in HTML, it’s probably the one most in need of improvements.
There are language settings? I signed up through the voyager app and I didn’t see any language settings, is that why I can’t see anything other laguages?
How is a person supposed to know which instance to choose before knowing what each instance is even about? Or what an instance even is. The barrier to creating an account is too high.
If there was an account migration option it would be possible to throw users into a random instance which federates with everyone and later let them migrate with their account age and post history.
They’re not. One can join any instance they like. But its like “what brand of toilet paper is someone to buy when they move out?” Thats for you to figure out. Ask someone, try a couple and settle for what helps you most.
That said, account migration would be nice although the possible issues are pretty brutal. An account is mostly a bunch of posts, comments and subscriptions. Reposting them would be fatal, relinking them would be dangerous. Only the subscriptions would be easy to move and i think that exists already.
I see your point. But imo its technically not really feasible.
No there are activation periods as well. Mods have to approve your account. You can’t just jump in and get to know the place. There are so many different barriers to entry. And this is for people not even knowing whether Lemmy is a good place to go.
Maybe a LemmyAnon “tutorial” instance to dump all the users with no verification and let them get to know Lemmy before choosing an instance?
Hahaha okay troll. You know very well that you can use lemmy wherever you want. A huge portion of lemmy users are just lurking. Every service on this planet that doesnt mass troll its users has an entry barrier for that exact reason. Good luck with that idea.
A single activation period for the account is honestly way better than what Reddit has where you’re not allowed to post in a ton of large subreddits because you don’t have enough karma or your account is too new.
But people cannot sign in to the account while awaiting activation. This is a turnoff because people will leave and not come back when their account is activated.
A better option would be letting them sign in but only giving them comment/posting rights when their application gets approved.
I gave up on Reddit a few months back, but to say that Lemmy is as simple and intuitive as reddit just isn’t true. I only use Lemmy now, and it’s not very convenient, but I get the highlights from the news, which is all I really wanted.
I also gave up on reddit a few months back and it’s basically the exact same experience, it just takes some set-up (just like reddit did, remember? 10 years ago when you made an account, remember that?)
the biggest difference is reddit was infested with generative bots later in its life than lemmy.
Now that I mention it, I haven’t seen any lemmybots 🤔
I don’t think it’s probably being bottled. I think there are just a combination of people who would rather be unhappy where they are than face a bit of resistance getting themselves out of their rut and people who are fanatically devoted to legacy social media due to sunk cost and have a hard time abandoning their decade old accounts. So whenever the topic comes up they are happy to trash Lemmy rather than improve their situation. They are on Reddit alternatives sub for a reason but they won’t get off their ass because nothing is perfect enough for them
Yes. Of course the big platforms actively seek to undermine competitors. There’s billions of dollars at stake. Something that really convinced me was reading about how Facebook ran VPN services to spy on traffic so they could spot budding competitor platforms.
We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular. Something I’m not convinced they ever stopped doing. I believe reddit corporate still bots their own site for whatever purpose they require in the moment. I absolutely believe they troll their own site. Remember spez is the guy who live edits the production database.
I used facebook way too much and the thing that got me to finally delete my account in 2011 was I had made a post about discovering diaspora and linking my account. Hung out with a friend a month or two later and he loaded up my facebook profile and could see every post I had ever made except the one about a federated facebook alternative.
Veering a little off-topic now, but facebook contacts being my irl friends made that feel so dangerous to me. If half my friends have opinion A and the other half opinion B, then if one opinion is entirely censored but I still see everything posted matching the approved opinion, that will have an enormous sway over how my worldview develops, in a way different from seeing strangers agreeing on those same things.
I came to Lemmy after being permabanned on Reddit, and I didn’t have any problem signing up, logging in, or using it.
I also miss the smaller crowds, but I don’t miss the pages of puns, shitposts, trolls, 4Chan refugees, contrarians, novelty accounts, bots, Russian Propaganda Farmers, etc. I do miss the active forums for some of my favorite subjects, like guitars. The few forums that exist are very quiet, with posts every few days, weeks or even months, instead of constantly, like Reddit.
I find it much better for politics, if for no other reason that we can talk openly without getting suspended or banned.
For sure, people who play guitar (and my other big hobbyi trail riding) typically won’t be this privacy focussed, so I need to go back to Reddit if I want discussion on that outside of real life. There’s other website forums for those at least.
I miss the days when reddit was full of tech-minded people (back when they had to compete with Digg). These days it’s full of normies, and normies tend to be fucking idiots. Just look at any YouTube comment section, which is filled with them.
As the saying goes, the average person isn’t very smart, and by definition half of the population is even less savvy.
I don’t think Lemmy is too confusing to use but I do think it’s poorly explained. Most people new to a server are only looking at two things:
- Overall content on the front page and how effective its filtering is.
- A topic specific community they are interested in.
But when they begin see the content can be vastly different from server to server and the topics they care about can be split into many communities on different servers they aren’t sure how to access what they want and lose interest.
Most of the negative answers on /r/RedditAlternatives are either botted or bad faith.
[email protected] to see a few examples
