Fediverse

People forget that user experience isn't just the stuff on the screen you interact with. There is a governance piece that is lacking in a lot of instances, and in the open source community as a whole. A lot of the successful projects out there are backed by some kind of foundation.

Take a look at the latest Hexbear drama. Some person out there owned the domain for their instance and let it expire. Now they are in a bidding war with a crypto site with a hexagon-related name. If they had formed some kind of organization or entity that registered the domain and owned the instance, this probably wouldn't have happened. Their users wouldn't get redirected to a domain auction site when trying to access the site. That's not an ideal user experience. It destroys trust.

SDF being a 501c(7) is one of the reasons that it's my home instance. For me, it provides a level of trust that an instance run by some random person on the internet doesn't. If there is a big federation/defederation debate, then it's really up to the membership to decide, and not a collection of admins or a single person getting the vibe of the users.

Another thing to remember is that Lemmy really shouldn't be competing against Reddit. The purpose of Reddit is to have the user generate content in order to keep the user's attention on the site so they can sell targeted advertisements. This is the basic business model for all of commercial social media. It has nothing to do with creating communities. That is secondary. If you want more people on Lemmy so that there is more content for you to consume, just stay on Reddit or TikTok. They need to sell ads in order to fund model training to keep your engagement up in order to sell more ads in order to provide quarterly growth to their shareholders. If you want more people on Lemmy because more brains mean better communities, then focus the communities.

The real opportunity for the fediverse is getting a lot of the existing non-profits, social organizations, and other types of communities to set up their own instances. This answers the “what instance do I join?” question by joining the instance associated with the community you're already involved in. Another reason I'm on SDF is retro computing. If you're really into your local makerspace, then you probably have a community ready to go for a Lemmy instance. If you're involved in your HOA and you all have a Facebook page or are all over Nextdoor, maybe set up a Lemmy instance. In all these cases, the organizational infrastructure is there for the administrative stuff like getting a domain and paying for hosting.

Also, I'm old enough to remember that Facebook took off when everyone's parents started joining. Imagine if the AARP rolled out a Lemmy instance. They are big enough put some serious money into development. You would probably get a lot of accessibility improvements.

P.S.

Check out how theATL.social is organized. The guy did as a LLC, but he seems to be community focused and transparent.

https://yall.theatl.social/post/201135

https://opencollective.com/theatlsocial

https://yall.theatl.social/communities

Reading these comments I feel a sense of dread. You are all experiencing survivor bias. Initially when I ran into barriers I gave up for like a year before bothering to try Lemmy again.

If you don't want Lemmy to serve as an actual counter to corporate controlled social media if it means letting in "normies" then you are content with corporate controlled social media continuing to dominate our lives. Which sounds about right for humanity. The smugness is vile.

Just bring on the vacuum decay event already.

The comments here are smug as fuck.

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.

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.

New users get overwhelmed with decision fatigue, especially when they have average intelligence.

When selecting a federation, new users should be told:

"Because Lemmy isn't run by a large corporation, lots of small volunteers run Lemmy and run different copies of Lemmy at the same time. These different copies are called instances. You can choose 1 or just click the large red button and we'll randomly select one of the most popular instances for you. If you aren't sure what to choose, just press the button!"

Add a bell button and a whistle button.

I think instead of promoting a page where people have to choose a server, just send people to lemmy.world directly. We should probably just get people to sign up there at first and have the ability to migrate their accounts to other servers if they want to do that later.

Having to choose from multiple servers is asking people to choose between a bunch of options they know nothing about. Get people straight to looking at content and posting stuff as soon as possible, once they're more invested, and understand more about the different instances they can change servers if that's what they want to do.

But yeah writhing the code needed to make account migration seamless might be a lot of work so not sure if that will happen.

Nothing, this seems like a good thing, I don't want them here if they literally cannot even comprehend the concept of different servers, though somehow no one has this issue with discord even though it's dogshit, almost as if they just yearn for the corporate boot.

lol lol

1. Reddit sucks
2. I can’t be expected to make a decision
3. I’ll stick with reddit

"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"

It’s why my less “tech savvy” friends won’t join. They don’t understand what federation is, and No they don’t want to take 2 minutes to learn.

It’s annoying, but it’s reality. People don’t understand the whole different servers thing, federation, and how to pick one.

I realize marketing isn’t a strong suit (nor should it be), but I’m proposing two solutions (well maybe not solutions, but something to help):

• A quick animated video showing the benefits of Lemmy and how this all works (if it hasn’t already been done yet)

• A service that basically simplifies and centralizes the signup process to one screen. During server selection, users can see the most populated servers and click on them to learn the specific rules for the server, etc.

Idk, maybe we already have all this…or this is just complicating the issue. Or maybe we only want people willing to take 2 minutes to learn about how it all works. Tbh that’s a pretty good natural filter for the types of users I want to be interacting and discussing with.

endless wars of who's federeated with who

i've been here for months and months, i might have seen this mentioned as an aside once or twice. but "endless wars"?

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.

How did people figure out what email provider to use?

but it feels like old reddit

Yes, and that's a good thing.

There are lots of Lemmy apps that display posts in different ways. If you want "bells and whistles", then find an app that gives you that.

That bar to entry is a good thing; it helps keep most of the stupid out. The same stupid that ruined the rest of the internet.

Honestly, if picking a server is too difficult, how have you survived this long? It's literally like picking an email host. That's the UX people are complaining about. How far have we fallen that making a choice is now a problem? "Pick what you like" leads to people going "OMG, this is terrible, I have to make my own decisions😭😭" No wonder people love AI, because they can't think for themselves.

The only improvement would be setting a default or giving them themes to choose from which they are interested in and selecting a server for them based on that.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Lemmy UX is identical to old Reddit. Come on.

I assumed (probably incorrectly) that users would be visiting Lemmy via apps, so the UX would depend on which app they used.

I don't know. I have a soft spot for Lemmy. The interactions here seem more genuine less about updoots.

The tough part for me is that the reason I use Reddit is for bullshitting with people about sports teams I like. Lets look at some of the communities here.

• Baltimore Orioles -- There's one on lemmy.world with 150 subscribers. The last post is from 4 months ago and it's a game thread posted by a bot with 0 comments. There's also one on fanaticus.social with the last post from 7 months ago.
• Carolina Panthers -- There's one on fanaticus.social with 3 subscribers.
• Miami Heat -- There's one on lemmy.world with 10 subscribers.
• Pittsburgh Penguins -- Again, lemmy.world with 11 subscribers.

I'd love to get off reddit but until there's actually people to talk with, this place is just never going to meet the needs of sports content that I use Reddit for. I had no interest in Bluesky until some people actually got on it as well. The Shutdown Fullcast for college football brought a bunch of people and fans there so it gave some utility to the site. Without utility, there's no reason to be here.

Yea getting into Lemmy is confusing. I only use sync because it's easier, I have no idea how to even access it on desktop. It definitely needs some QoL improvements before I can really start recommending it to people

Better UX than Reddit, they even point out that it’s like old.reddit instead of the trash UX they have now

It’s just dismissive to get people to agree without looking

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.

The fediverse being "endless wars about who is federated" is not really true, is it?

Sure not everyone is federated with everyone else, but legacy social media is federated with nobody at all. Federation is the entire point of the Fediverse, you connect with people you want to connect with and you don't connect with people you don't. It's as simple as that.

Plus, do people really want to be on a single platform with everyone else in the world? Because that's a big part of what broke the internet in the first place...

99% of users are going to check out when you ask them what server to join.

I'm so sick of this dumb ass argument...

People who complain about "servers" need to tell me what they think "the internet" is. The existence of servers didn't stop online video games, email or discord/slack from catching on with hundreds of millions of people, so why is it suddenly a problem when it comes to the Fediverse?

Onboarding obviously needs to be better, but I'm going to be totally honest honest here: I don't think these are legitimate, actionable or useful critiques.

These are merely excuses from people who are addicted to legacy social media and who don't give a shit that the internet is owned and controlled by a few rich corporations.