Why is “drama” on Lemmy always highly exaggerated by people?
“Endless wars of who federates with who”. What is that person even talking about and who the fuck would even care as a normal user?
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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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?
"but it feels like old reddit". My god, imagine actively preferring the new reddit UI. Let them keep their shiny jangling keys instead of coming over here and pestering the devs for a snoovatar feature or whatever nonsense.
The 'maybe read for 2 minutes to figure it out' miniscule barrier to entry is a feature not a bug.
This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s
For the majority of commenters: UX is not UI.
The poor UX experience is the research a person has to do before they can even participate. You need to have a basic understanding of how the network works, and then you have to shop around for a server.
It’s enough friction to prevent people from on-boarding and that’s not good for a platform that needs people to be valuable.
Maybe this is a terrible thing to say, but I actually like that registering for federated sites requires a bit work.
IMO, the internet was more enjoyable when it was just full of us nerds 😅
That does come with the unavoidable side effect that the majority of the people will simply not participate. It then follows that sites like Reddit will continue to be the place where the majority of the people will go.
If your goal is to participate in small communities and you are okay with the slow pace of those communities, then that's fine. If your goal is to move people away from corporate-sponsored media for whatever reason, then this won't work.
it feels like old reddit
Wait, when did that become a bad thing? I exclusively browsed old.reddit.com because the new layout is a fucking abomination.
The biggest UX issues, in my opinion, is the process of choosing an instance and content discovery.
When you go to "join lemmy", rather than choosing a username, you're presented a big list of instances, and you have no idea what that means and what it means for your experience if you choose one. Even though in reality it doesn't really matter, just having the list paraylyses the user as it's not a process they're used to. Users are likely asking themselves:
- Am I going to miss out on content from other instances?
- Do I need an account per instance to interact with their communities?
Sometimes I think it would be best if we could have some kind of read-only instance people can create an account on and get stuck in first, then choose an instance to sign up to once they understand it. The instance would be locked down so they couldn't create any communities. So basically when they they're directed to join-lemmy and go to sign up, they create an account on that instance right away and get started.
On the discovery front, a potential idea would be to allow communities to have a specific category tags field. When a user signs up, the host instance could have a page that they're directed to (this would be controlled by the instance, so they wouldn't have to have it enabled) which lets the users pick some topics they're interested in and can then subscribe to the communities right away.
Sometimes I think it would be best if we could have some kind of read-only instance people can create an account on and get stuck in first, then choose an instance to sign up to once they understand it. The instance would be locked down so they couldn't create any communities.
I believe lemmy.myserv.one is what you're looking for.
Interesting, thanks!
Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
Not necessarily, but we don't want a accidental filter that filters out non tech savvy people. We want all kinds of people on Lemmy
I don't get how people get hung on choosing a server when people have been chosing a starter Pokémon since 1998 without any major issues. And you get just about the "same" amount of practical info.
Really, what tiktok does to a generation...
I would love info/data-sheets about all the instances, that would make the decision process easier:
- who de-federated who?
- who hosts most content related to topic X?
- number of users and their distribution of joined communities
- posts/second average user activity …
Well, when I started to use lemmy I had a few problems:
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- Then I had a discussion about how calling russian people "orcs" is racist. You guessed it, banned.
- 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.
Your #4 seems inaccurate, unless you were just walking us through your changing perspective as you joined.
This place is very left leaning and I’m sure it’s loaded with people who happily call themselves socialists while shouting down the MLs/tankies.
The main difference afaik is that they support authoritarians.
Lemmy has little reactionary people, but your definitions on who is authoritarian or who or what is "good" or "evil" have been manufactured by the mainstream media.
If you ever wonder on how to prevent foreign or capitalist interference into elections and mainstream social media, you will find yourself looking to China and Russia for inspiration.
Instead Lemmy has cut off any dissent from the actual socialists, those who oppose the systems that created the conditions for the rise of neofascism. People can't even imagine or tolerate other ways of managing power. Therefor Lemmy is a failure.
Of course the Tankies or "dirtbag left" have their share of blame for that too
When the Orcs are raping elderly women and their sons. Then murdering them. They deserve the name. Just so you’re aware. There’s a reason they are called this. They earned it.
You can use extreme examples about any group, like black americans, or chinese, japanese or vietnamese enemies and then use derogatory names for the whole group.
Doing that is called racism. Example: You're a racist, like a nazi. Since we're on lemmy, all lemmy users are nazis. See how stupid that is to say?
Once a war starts, law and order goes out the window and war crimes are inevitable, as well as awful death and destruction and untold suffering.
And Russia is not solely responsible for starting this war. Should others who helped to start it not be held accountable?
Also, the civilian death toll in the Ukraine war is still lower than the death toll in gaza or the (second) iraq invasion. It's also hypocritical to dehumanize Russians but not USArians.
Never heard of soldiers in the USA rape and murder elderly women in conflict zones. Orks are named so for a reason. They are monsters.
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.
I love this! Totally agree, and you know what? I don't need to give you an "award" and enrich the site owners with unnecessary money waste. I hope it never changes too. Quality over quantity.
Who cares? If someone can't figure out how to join a server, then I don't want them here. If people think that reddit has some amazing UX, then I don't want them here. If people think another corporate website (bluesky) will save us, then please stay away...
The post about Lemmy has 500 upvotes while the crybaby replies only have like 100. I'll happily take a ratio of 5 reasonable people joining Lemmy for every 1 weak baby staying on Reddit.
...and the fediverse doesn't need to dominate all social media. Period.
You'll never be able to migrate the IG influencer whose affiliate marketing business relies on the algorithm, or the Titkok million views dude who makes money off their views and lives. So I really don't understand this argument of "Oh we're alienating mass users".
Just like there's non-profit orgs vs businesses, open source software vs commerical ones, there also fediverse vs commercial social media. I prefer it here, and to each their own.
Good UI (in my android app) is the reason I came to Lemmy.
I use Eternity on android and it's a fantastic and much cleaner feel than reddit.
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.