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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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Really early on like right after the API fuckfest, there was a large influx of users who picked servers based on whatever. As a result, servers defederated and there was a lot of drama as a result.
Though that said I haven't heard much about defederating in some time.
What would prevent the same happening in the next wave of rats jumping ship? They don't know anything about the servers or their niches, so they pick whatever. Listing all the servers and their missions is a good start for those motivated to join, but for those more on the fence, how do we ease the transition?
I personally see three big issues with getting new users to Lemmy use and stat on Lemmy:
Join-lemmy provides a subpar experience: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536
Pull requests are more than welcome to improve the site. Its basic Typescript, TailwindCSS and Inferno.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site
You can also make changes to the documentation, its markdown just like Lemmy itself. So if you would write something differently then open a pull request and change it!
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs
Thanks for reminding.
I'm more busy on [email protected] at the moment but I might give it a go at some point.
Just seems strange to have so many people wanting to fix this in this thread without actually acting
Exactly it seems most people here still didn't realize that this is an open source project run by volunteers, not a corporation with countless employees and a profit motive. If people want something to get done then it's best they start doing it themselves.
tbf a lot of people here don't know how to code, or even where to start if they do
There's been a few of those posts lately, the next one I'm probably going to suggest the OP to improve the onboarding themselves
I’ve mentioned a list with info of some nature a few times, with people shutting down the idea. It always boiled down to “the instances may lie about what their instance is about”. In their heads what their write may be the truth, even if it isn’t. This would leave it up to a third party to make summaries of these instances, which may or may not be agreed upon. There may be too many drastic and conflicting ideologies.
It would help of Lemmy had a simple migration option like Mastodon. Then, picking an instance wouldn't be a big deal.
It's also less likely to happen now. Back when that happened, users didn't have the ability to block instances and so it was up to the admins to do that for everyone.
It's now possible to block instances at the user level
Not really though - that only mutes communities, while the users are still free to troll you by replying and generating notifications in posts sent to other communities.
Worse, that protection has even weakened rather than strengthened over time - the notifications used to be blocked. I almost decided to leave Lemmy myself when I continued to receive notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after accidentally responding to a post that I encountered in All - I hadn't read the sidebar, I didn't know about that instance, and so how was I supposed to know!?
I did that in Lemmygrad, and then again in [email protected] - and after that, I very much understand why people say that we are miserable tankie trolls over here.
It's the Nazi bar effect: "We" might be fine, but there are places here that anyone can just wander into without any advanced notice of what will happen...and then they leave. And complain over in r/RedditAlternatives, warning others against attempting the same.
And since it's TRUE, we DESERVE this reputation. 100% of the people I've ever mentioned Lemmy to have outright chided me for having mentioned it. I can see why, with such bOtH sIdEs SaMe content as this:
Pepperidge Farm remembers.