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?
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Unless we fix the UX problems in Lemmy, a Bluesky-like alternative of reddit is going to pop up, and overtake Lemmy, like what happened with Mastadon
Easy fix, if it isnt federated I give them a one star and talk about how im tired of ads and corporate influence in my discussion forums so id rather use the threadiverse, prob does nothing but if it gets even one person to google and switch it was worth the 5 seconds it took to type
I did this for a couples posts that popped up on redditalrs that werent lemmy, they were definitelty alread netuered and ready for ads, worse than reddit
Agreed. But as long as people don't actively leave Lemmy in favor of the new service I'd be okay with it I guess. I mean it would still be cool if Lemmy grew larger but hey, we got a nice little community here
I think the irony here is that the user-friendliness experience of Bluesky stems from it being a centralized service (in practice). I seriously doubt most people who signed up for Bluesky even understand what "decentralized social media" means.
I'm not saying Lemmy (and the greater Fediverse) can't improve, but it's clear that the biggest barrier for most people is the decentralized aspect itself -- the core of the Fediverse -- which is something one shouldn't really "hide".
As long as the state of social media usership demands centralized practices, then the Fediverse will forever be at a disadvantage in gaining mass adoption in my opinion.
What I don’t get is why not pretend it’s centralized and just recommend a server when you introduce someone to lemmy instead of trying to teach them?
Oh you want an alternative to Reddit, here, go to lemmy.ca since your Canadian.
This is my thought... Don't hide it, really, more like toss a blanket over that part while people get settled. Most will stick with the defaults (whether a single default like lemmy.world or regional defaults like lemmy.ca), but they'll get the option if that's something they want to change later (I do wish there was a way to move instances rather than having to make a new account, that might also help improve adoption... "Just go with this one while you settle in and move when you know where you want to go")
We have a slight disadvantage in that regard yes, but I know we can get to a UX comparable to Bluesky and Reddit.
There just doesn't seem to be much focus on it, I feel setting good defaults will solve most of these issues.
Lemmy is nice for me now, but it took a lot of effort finding the settings and UI that I like, people will give up long before that.
See, I just use Thunder client and the defaults are x1000 times better than the official reddit app.
Text-based forums are a niche. The vast majority of the population doesn't like that format. There's a reason no Bluesky has emerged, the appeal is just not there.
About Bluesky, there was an app that allowed "Reddit view" (so threads with votes). Can't find it back right now, the search mostly show Flashes, the Instagram alternative, which probably reflects the larger interest for that type of format.
The web ui has this option now. Although you can't collapse threads so it's still pretty hard to navigate
If anything the success or the Twitter ui shows you don't always need a good UX to succeed
Serious question here: what is the bad ux experience of lemmy compared to reddit? (except choosing an instance in the beginning, I get that this might turn off a lot of people)
It's a solved problem. Check out phtn.app and vger.app also Alexandrite, Next and Tesseract. Like the problem is solved 5 times over.
Alexandrite is honestly great. Made the experience much better. Just wish I could have it open links in a separate tab.
Unless we use one of those as the default UI, the problem isn't solved, people will give up before knowing of their existence.
You can literally just share phtn.app and say its how you use the threadiverse/lemmy, it doesnt need to be hosted on a site with the same lemmy instance you can login to any account through these frontends
Tell it to the hosts.