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?

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    71
    ·
    edit-2
    4 hours ago

    Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it ‘wars’.

    As for UX, there’s definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstance without explicitly subbing to them all or using lemmyverse.net.

    But I don’t think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.

    If that was a legitimate issue, MMO’s (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn’t have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.

    Even if Lemmy was one big simple centralized server, that user would just come up with another reason they couldn’t switch.

    “Oh, it’s too small, my niche communities aren’t there”

    “The UI isn’t as nice”

    “The mod tools aren’t as good”

    Etc.

    • Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      4 minutes ago

      I specifically remember looking up tables of who defederates from who and what instances allow NSFW or downvoting because this was an issue among some of the top instances back then.

      I ended up making 4 different accounts over 2 months until I landed on a server I’m happy with. That will never be acceptable to any normal user.

      Every time someone brings up these issues, people here downplay them like you are doing it right now and nothing is ever done about it.

    • hinterlufer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      3 hours ago

      eh, back when the “exodus” was happening it felt like every second post is about defederation. Nowadays you don’t hear much about it anymore, but if you only looked back then I see how you could come to that conclusion.

    • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      ·
      4 hours ago

      The only real federation dramas I can think of were relating to Hexbear and Beehaw. If Greenleaf was on one of those instances then maybe it could explain their skewed perspective. Otherwise yeah, I don’t get it.

        • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 hours ago

          That’s fair I guess. I remember that. That was around the same time as well, so someone registered to say Beehaw or Hexbear during the Threads fediverse announcement period would probably get the idea that federation wars is all that’s going, at least if they stopped visiting Lemmy shortly thereafter.

    • .Donuts@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      4 hours ago

      If that was a legitimate issue, MMO’s (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn’t have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.

      But in an MMO, you still get the same content no matter what server you choose. Over here, it directly impacts what content you can interact with based on (de)federation.

      • hemmes@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 hours ago

        I’m on three different instances and the sort by All-hot feed is nearly identical.

        I’m not on Beehaw or Hexbear, but those instances make it pretty well known they block a lot of other instances.

      • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        4 hours ago

        If you joined a German-speaking WoW server as a non-speaking German, the experience was going to be subpar

        • .Donuts@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          3 hours ago

          Yes, and if you join a German-speaking instance as a non-German speaking user, the experience will also be subpar. Hence I talked about content, not language.