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?

  • ad_on_is@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    4 days ago

    Whether these are just lazy excuses or not, but let’s be real for a moment.

    Imagine someone, who’s used to go to reddit.com, search for a reddit app in the app store, both of which have the same logo, design, etc… and use their username/password to login and browse the content.

    almost every service, that people use for the last decades is based on this specific approach, except for emails. Even the TLD was always .com

    Now imagine, how overwhelmed those people might feel, when you tell them “just come over to lemmy”.

    Lemmy, where? lemmy.com? Here’s where you then start explaining the different instances, federation, etc…

    the next question will be: where’s the Lemmy app? Remember, the unified logo and design? well, good luck explaining that all lemmy apps are de facto third-party-apps.

    Now, once they make it throug all of that, the next hurdle that will confuse the hell out of them are the communities scattered all across the instances.

    • Karu 🐲@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      While I understand and largely agree with your point, I think it’s worthwhile to question whether it’s reasonable that this is the way people expect the Internet to work.

      Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack, so that unless you’re somewhat tech-savvy, you can’t tell the concept of app apart from the concept of server. Not unlike how Android and iOS have been obscuring many basics of the system to the point that some people don’t even know what a filesystem is.

      Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved, rather than just “the way things work” and that we need to cather to it. Mostly because FOSS services will always, invariably, struggle to adapt to a conception of the internet optimized for consumption and nothing else.

      I agree that people nowadays might struggle to understand what, for instance, a third-party app is, but I also think it’s too an unreasonably low bar to just let it be, and have FOSS forever playing acrobatics to somehow adapt to it.

      Whether Lemmy should be the one leading this struggle is a whole another argument lol. Somehow forcing people to understand this with Lemmy in particular, without changing anything of the larger culture, will just cause people to not use Lemmy outright.

      But this cannot be the way it works. Everyone using the internet needs some bare minimum tech literacy.

      • ad_on_is@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack,

        I fully agree here. Whatever software they have developed, is not rocket science, and mostly based off of existing standards.

        Gmail, Outlook, etc… just a bunch of *DAV servers on top of an emailing service, paired with some SSO. Same goes for Reddit/X/FB. A simple DB just storing some info and doing some fancy sorting based on that info.

        Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved

        Yes!

        But, on the other hand it’s a two-fold sword.

        Corps are making money off of peoples lack of knowledge, and this has been the way of how “offering a service” is being done probably since human history… and yes, it pisses me off as well, especially when it comes to human health and nutrition, etc…

        But…

        Say, you hire contract workers, to build a house, bc. you don’t know how to do it yourself. Then you need to hire someone else to approve the quality of the work that’s been done, since again… you lack the knowledge. After you’ve moved in, something breaks, again… you hire someone to fix it.

        Now, at what point do you start learning about all the components involved in a built house? electricity, plumbering, walls, etc… and most importantly, do you even care in learning so or not?

        And some people, just don’t care. They simply don’t. Even if the concept of a topic is very easy to grasp, they simply lack the interest in knowing about how it works.

        • Karu 🐲@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          Say you hire a company to build a house. You don’t have the skills or the know-to, but at some point, you’ll have to deal with some inevitable aspects of building a house, if only to discuss them with the workers. Say they “force” you to deal with plumbing, for example by including it in the budget. Imagine if you not only don’t know how plumbing works, but also what plumbing is. Maybe you’ve never had to think about it before. What would you do? Would you go to another company that doesn’t force you to deal with it, perhaps by not even providing it in the first place?

          Say for the sake of argument that this becomes a generalized problem, and companies use it as an excuse to no longer provide plumbing in new houses, as a cost-saving measure. Most people don’t seem to care. Over 10 years pass by, and people have gotten used to expect not having running water at home. “It sucks, but that’s the way it is I guess”.

          Now, a community-driven initiative arises to build cheaper houses, complete with running water. Can you imagine most people refusing participating, because building a house with running water implies having to know that plumbing supplies water? That the mere thought of it is already too complicated, and that maybe having fresh water at home is only for people whose special interest is plumbing?

          You need some elementary knowledge on things, if only to exist in the world. The Fediverse, and I mean this wholeheartedly, is not that complicated once you grasp the most basic concepts of the internet.

          While I won’t deny outright that open-source devs most of the time don’t think about making their software accessible to the wider public, and that some aspects of decentralized social media still have to be ironed out (duplicated communities on Lemmy are a pet-peeve of mine); these issues are often heavily blown out of proportion. Besides people honestly not understanding some concepts, I think there is also some deliberate anti-intellectualism going on with this topic in particular. People who spend their afternoons troubleshooting Windows just so that their computer games run at 60 FPS suddenly don’t know what a website is when Mastodon is mentioned.

          I’m pretty certain that this “Fediverse is too complicated” mantra would not have worked at all before 2010.

      • ad_on_is@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        I think, you didn’t get my point.

        Everything you mentioned, is nice and all, but who cares where the server is located? if they federate with each other, it doesn’t matter. Again, I’m just talking from a novices POV and things thst might confuse them. They surely confused me at the very beginning

        • FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          4 days ago

          In the EU there is some amount of data protection and privacy rights, so that matters to quite a few people. Commercial outfits handle those distinctions behind the scenes (eg, US users vs EU users get different amounts of privacy). On the fediverse, the user has to figure this out themselves.

          Beyond that, I agree with everything you say. Some of the instances don’t even have the name “Lemmy” in the domain or brand which makes it confusing. Or maybe they’re not Lemmy but just ActivityPub compatible. I have no idea. You can also get unlucky picking a “bad” server. I first joined Kbin.social because it had the best UI at the time but man, it rarely worked and totally put me off.

          • ad_on_is@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            Yes! I as well started my Lemmy journey on kbin first.

            Back when the API changes were introduced in Reddit, everyone on Reddit kept about lemmy.

            Then, in the comments you read stuff like “Lemmy are a bunch of tankies, kbin is better, yada yada”…

            Great, now you’re already torn between two sides, without even knowing about the basic concepts of how they both work.

            You then go to one Lemmy server, and see how bad the UI is, then you check out kbin, and it feels nice.

            Well, and the rest is history…

            • FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              3 days ago

              The whole process was a massive time and energy drain in the end with no benefit. I don’t think anyone with a life would pursue something like this any further. I trialled-and-errored my way to Lemmy.world while I was out of work. Otherwise I’d still be on Reddit.