In other places on around the web, (chiefly /r/RedditAlternatives) whenever Lemmy is brought up, invariably I see the exact same complaints from brand new accounts.
Lemmy is too complicated, it wont gain traction, can’t figure out how to use it, can’t log in, etc.
Now, I’m definitely more tech savvy than the average redditor, but I just don’t see the complaints. You can go to any Lemmy site, instantly start doomscrolling with a familiar UI, and sign up on all the instances I’ve tried has been frankly more simple than making a new reddit account. The only real complaint I have is the generally smaller volume of users and posts.
My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.
Ideally, the first link someone sees when googling Lemmy would be a global feed on a fairly generic instance, with a basic tagline akin to ‘front page of the internet.’ End users don’t need to care about the technical details, at least not until they’re interested in the platform.
So is this “Lemmy is too confusing” sentiment even real? And if not, what motive would there be to astroturf this?
If it is a real issue affecting would-be users, how can we address it?
Stupid people thinking little Lemmy is too complicated to use is a feature not a bug. If someone can’t figure out how to use the Lemmy interface why would we even want them here?
We got a glimpse of what a true exodus could look like, and I’m with you. As much as I’d love to see Reddit collapse from its own shittiness, for Lemmy’s sake I’d rather see a trickle who have a chance to learn manners and leave their vitriol behind.
Not saying Lemmy’s perfect. I’m not saying I’m perfect: I have bad days and make asshole responses, too. But they get swallowed, or I get a reasonable response and I apologize. In the main, the real, consistent excuses for human beings who resist the opportunity to become better people tend to join instances like Hexbear, and can be blocked en mass.
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Nah gatekeeping is good. I agree this place and the fediverse in general are massive echo chambers and that’s bad, but the more of the general public that gets on a platform the worse it gets. Obviously you can’t have an IQ filter or a test to get on, so a janky hard to use interface is good enough to scare away Facebook drones and brainrot zombies.
Agree. Some people are just too dumb to own a computer. Giving them access to internet is like giving a Kalashnikov to a monkey.
If the fediverse has any chance at properly succeeding it must create a “front page” for each alternative. Lemmy for reddit for example. There is no reason why all of lemmy can’t have a front page like old.lemmy.world with each community/platform on lemmy being connected and allowing for ease of access unlike what it is currently where you need a different account for every single Lemmy site
you need a different account for every single Lemmy site
What are you talking about? You are using a lemmy.world account to comment in a lemmy.ml community right now.
Your comment seems to misunderstand federation and the function of activitypub. Lemmy does have an All front page that is the front page of All Lemmy servers that your instance knows about and hasn’t defederated with.
You don’t need an account for each instance, you just post on your local instances copy of the community/post and your post shows up on all other Lemmy servers that you instance knows about.
You may have inadvertently made your own point, that it isn’t intuitive for newcomers but a single front page/account totally defeats the purpose of decentralized social media.
You have described BlueSky which is distributed but not decentralized and will enshittify the same as Reddit and twitter and the only benefit to ATProto is some other public benefit corp could potentially host a copy of the network in its place until that business decides to enshittify of course
This is exactly why we need a software solution as an app for Lemmy rather than web + plugins
I know none that exist right now
Yes. Of course the big platforms actively seek to undermine competitors. There’s billions of dollars at stake. Something that really convinced me was reading about how Facebook ran VPN services to spy on traffic so they could spot budding competitor platforms.
We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular. Something I’m not convinced they ever stopped doing. I believe reddit corporate still bots their own site for whatever purpose they require in the moment. I absolutely believe they troll their own site. Remember spez is the guy who live edits the production database.
I used facebook way too much and the thing that got me to finally delete my account in 2011 was I had made a post about discovering diaspora and linking my account. Hung out with a friend a month or two later and he loaded up my facebook profile and could see every post I had ever made except the one about a federated facebook alternative.
Veering a little off-topic now, but facebook contacts being my irl friends made that feel so dangerous to me. If half my friends have opinion A and the other half opinion B, then if one opinion is entirely censored but I still see everything posted matching the approved opinion, that will have an enormous sway over how my worldview develops, in a way different from seeing strangers agreeing on those same things.
We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular.
That’s not quite it. The founders made a few of throwaway accounts and posted a bunch of links that exemplified what they wanted people to post. It was fake activity, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t automated. It was maybe 50 posts and I don’t think it was a bad thing to do.
I’m probably the least tech savvy person on Lemmy. If my dumb ass can figure it out, the subset of Reddit’s population who we’d actually want in Lemmy’s community should have no problem.
That said, onboarding could have been better, and you’re right about the potential hangups: “fediverse” sounds like some kind of federal government function like a hub website that links to all the different .gov agencies, and “Lemmy” sounds like a cartoon character. Choosing an instance was more stressful than it probably should have been; ultimately went with .world by blindly following the advice of a YouTube video, but on day 1 I was pretty oblivious to the extremist shit that’s associated with instances like .ml and had no clue what ‘tankie’ even meant.
That was two years ago though - no idea if that reflects what getting started is like today.
And again, that’s all coming from a relatively tech-dumbass, so I’d imagine it’s probably smoother for people less prone to starting a fire when they turn their computer turns on.
Edit: sorry to anyone who had to read that before the edit… when I’m tired I have an annoying tendency to think a word as I’m typing and then just skip to the next one. And I’m tired all the fucking time, so my posts have a lot of holes Q_Q
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I don’t think Lemmy is too confusing to use but I do think it’s poorly explained. Most people new to a server are only looking at two things:
- Overall content on the front page and how effective its filtering is.
- A topic specific community they are interested in.
But when they begin see the content can be vastly different from server to server and the topics they care about can be split into many communities on different servers they aren’t sure how to access what they want and lose interest.
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I gave up on Reddit a few months back, but to say that Lemmy is as simple and intuitive as reddit just isn’t true. I only use Lemmy now, and it’s not very convenient, but I get the highlights from the news, which is all I really wanted.
How is a person supposed to know which instance to choose before knowing what each instance is even about? Or what an instance even is. The barrier to creating an account is too high.
If there was an account migration option it would be possible to throw users into a random instance which federates with everyone and later let them migrate with their account age and post history.
I don’t think it’s probably being bottled. I think there are just a combination of people who would rather be unhappy where they are than face a bit of resistance getting themselves out of their rut and people who are fanatically devoted to legacy social media due to sunk cost and have a hard time abandoning their decade old accounts. So whenever the topic comes up they are happy to trash Lemmy rather than improve their situation. They are on Reddit alternatives sub for a reason but they won’t get off their ass because nothing is perfect enough for them
yeah, the ui sucks ass if you dont use an app
Source?
The fediverse is too complicated which I said in detail on my post on c/fediverse currently its a mess each domain has hundreds of different sites that aren’t interconnected and where you need to create a new account on each. If Lemmy had a front page like reddit and allowed for all its smaller communities to be coded and personalized to be completely different while allowing the top 25 posts every 24 hours to pop up and allowing a place to search for a specific community. We could still allow an approval process for specific communities but reddit would fall in months with how mods at reddit currently behave
Tip for you since it sounds you are genuinely trying it out but are running into issues: you can post and comment on outside Lemmy communities without creating a different account for the most part. Just navigate to lemmy.world/c/[community name]@[other site domain]. Example: https://lemmy.world/c/science_memes@mander.xyz means you can interact with the community on mander.xyz while staying on your lemmy.world account.
A Lemmy server agnostic link can be made in the form of ![community name]@[other site domain]. Example: !science_memes@mander.xyz, or !fediverse@lemmy.world to help people from anywhere on lemmy to link to c/fediverse.
There’s still a lot of gaps like official methods to redirect post and comment links to your instance (I heard it was coming soon) It is indeed behind Reddit in a lot of technical and social aspects, but I think it’s not completely a bad thing.
