“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.

“Here’s Lemmy. It’s like Reddit. There’s a bunch of different websites for it, but they all have basically the same people and posts on them. Just join one near you, if you don’t like it you can always use a different one later”

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…

The one thing that I like about the fediverse is that it somehow unintentionally has a filter to keep the low effort people from poisoning the well.

I have been on the fediverse from 2019 and these types of arguments have been floated times and again at each exodus wave. they expect to be offered everything on a silver platter. they come into a new platform maintained by hobbyists and good will people and they expect it to offer the same features, experiences and user base or even better than the once on proprietary media that spend billions of dollars to acquire that user base. they get screwed by one company and hope that another for profit won’t do the same. Lemmy is even easier than email, as you don’t need to know the handle of people of communities you interact with you just search for them or explore the public feed. We don’t need them here.

there are many aspects the fediverse can improve upon. decentralization or federation isn’t one of them

IMO if Lemmy had all the features that old.reddt had it would still be an objectivly worse UX experience. Federating reduces UX, that’s just a rule.

We should focus on making the onboarding process as simple as possible like enabling social login (inb4 insecure and not private: let people make their choices), and making it easier to move between instances and understand what instance you’re looking at.

When reddit was coming up, a big issue people had was it was too confusing with bad UI. People didn’t know which subreddits to follow. Its very similar, theres just a whole other layer.

Just find a popular instance that is federated with similar instances. And making accounts are easy too, so just do it in two or three instances. Yeah it’s a bit much compared to reddit, but it’s very very easy.

Reddit being popular is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy.

When you get right down to it: people don’t care that Reddit is selling their information, that the site itself is a piece of garbage, that running the site requires a bunch of no-life weirdos whose numbers will only increase going forward and whose power will likewise, or that the design actively encourages bots to the point of disincentivizing actual human beings from using it.

They want their memes, they want their news, they want their niche little interest subs and they want their porn. The simple fact is that lemmy is a smaller version of Reddit with fewer options and to the majority of people who don’t care about their data or the objectively dogshit running of the site, there is no reason to cross over to Lemmy.

Until Reddit takes a Musk-type turn into being totally unuseable, lemmy will only see a trickle of users who are burned by Reddit.

Which server do you want to use is like asking “Do you want Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo for email?” it really isn’t that big of a deal, but maybe people these days have a hard time doing that too…

Good keep those numb nuts away. Reddit sucks not only because of Spez and his greedy overlords, many of the users suck as well and I bet there is a big overlap on the Venn diagram between people who suck and people who think lemmy is confusing

I spent way too much time trying to understand why I wasn’t taken to the comments when I hit the comment icon…

… in the screenshot

The second this hurdle is crossed we’ll need a new Lemmy

I’ve gone on this diatribe about PIxelfed’s onboarding process, where they have a website that says “This page will help find the perfect server for you” and then is designed to present as little meaningful information about each server as possible. Looking at join-lemmy.org, it’s marginally better. “You can access all content from the Lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which you choose” 1. not strictly true and 2. if it doesn’t matter why make the choice?

Here’s a question I have, because I’m honestly not sure: Let’s say most of the communities I’m personally interested in are on example.lol. But my account is on sh.itjust.works. How much am I burdening sh.itjust.works by mostly reading and posting to example.lol? Would I be decreasing people’s operating costs if I just opened an account on example.lol so most of my interaction was on my home instance?

Bells and whistles = ads, tracking, loads of bots

I think a big problem is a lot of the explainers for new users, at least the ones that were around back when I first joined Mastodon, were or are absolute dog shit. They were all existential explanations rather than practical ones. I was trying to figure out which instance to join, and why one might be better for me than another, and every explainer I saw was basically a variation on, “iT’s JuSt LikE EmAiL. wHy Is tHaT hArD? sToP bEiNg So sTuPid, DuMmY.” None of them really explained the user experience, and how different instances might affect it, let alone the existence of the local and global feeds and how your instance choice affects those. It was like asking someone how to use chopsticks and them telling you, “It’s easy. Just put food in your mouth with them. Works just like a fork.”

Technically true, but it omits some pretty crucial information.

Once you’re into it and have the lay of the land, it seems really simple in retrospect. But if you’re coming in cold with no idea how any of it works, and the only help you get is some dickhead shouting, “EmAiL! iT’s LiKe EmAiL!” then the learning curve seems a lot steeper than it actually is.

Could have auto versus manual server choice. Can always maintain option for granular selection for those who want, but “normies” could walk into a quiz when migrating?

• Top three things you used Reddit for? (List of maybe 10+ things, servers can maintain their feature list to empower this)

• Do you like A) talking to everybody about days topics B) talking to a smaller group of like minded people

• Do you like A) a MORE moderated space B) a LESS moderated space, realizing you may see more spam and controversy

And then calculates a server that meets needs, if multiple, then random number generator to assign a server from the filtered options. On user side, all they see is a quiz followed by a typical registration screen. This would help with distribution of users across niche servers, but feel lighter for user. They also would assume a more curated experience, regardless of where they end up. Servers could have to opt in to be fed users from search of they were afraid of impact on cost to maintain server.

The above likely aren’t the right questions, but this framework could be effective