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?

  • Meldrik
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    1358 hours ago

    Why is “drama” on Lemmy always highly exaggerated by people?

    “Endless wars of who federates with who”. What is that person even talking about and who the fuck would even care as a normal user?

    • @[email protected]
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      115 minutes ago

      I haven’t heard about any of that drama since the early days when things were still getting sorted out

    • @[email protected]
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      54 hours ago

      There are a few .world posters who make two to three posts a day about how much they hate lemmygrad hexbear and .ml.

      • ihatebirds
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        33 hours ago

        you will probably stop seeing much of that if you block users that post a lot to fediverselore and meanwhileongrad. They’re like the /r/subredditdrama of lemmy

      • Meldrik
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        23 hours ago

        Well that’s just a waste of time really.

    • @adam_y
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      698 hours ago

      Been using Lemmy for a couple of years, not seen this once.

      Also, the ux is pretty much the same as Reddit.

      These people are just stakeholders in Reddit. They are afraid of change, or losing any rep they have. They sit on a pile of useless upvotes.

      • Banana
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        176 hours ago

        I think a lot of people that think the UX is different from reddit weren’t on reddit 14 years ago when it did look very similar to this.

      • @[email protected]OP
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        117 hours ago

        The UX once you figure out what works for you in Lemmy is nice, the UX getting to that point is terrible, as many have said. Most will quit before getting to the good part.

        • Fushuan [he/him]
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          33 hours ago

          Yeah, the UX of alexandrite, Voyager or even the Voyager web app for PC are sublime. I don’t see any difference from reddit tbh.

      • @Aqarius
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        16 hours ago

        Really? You never ran into the endless “…furthermore, .ml must be defederated” posts?

        • @Contramuffin
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          12 hours ago

          Same vibe as Cato in the Roman Senate: ml delenda est

          • @Aqarius
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            12 hours ago

            Oh, sure, especially if it’s the same few users. It’s just mildly surprising to not even run into them.

    • @[email protected]
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      358 hours ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        67 hours ago

        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?

        • @ApollosArrow
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          23 hours ago

          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.

        • @[email protected]
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          36 hours ago

          I personally see three big issues with getting new users to Lemmy use and stat on Lemmy:

          • knowing about it: It is a matter of time before Reddit bans linking to Lemmy. Either by outright preventing their discussion via shadow deletes or full deletes. join-lemmy.org would be well served by purchasing ads on Google and on Bing
          • join-lemmy ux needs to be improved: this goes to your point and I fully agree that there needs to be a better onboarding experience. I am a fairly technical guy and even I had trouble understanding the major concepts behind Lemmy. Many of these concepts aren’t terribly important to a new user though. At least at first.
          • more and better content: this is fortunately getting better but we’re not there yet
      • @roofuskit
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        27 hours ago

        Pepperidge Farm remembers.

    • Banana
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      66 hours ago

      I’ve seen it a few times but it’s really easy to avoid tbh

    • @[email protected]
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      138 hours ago

      When half the posts in your feed are “X instance bad” people get just tired and go out.

      It has happened to me sometimes a meaningful part of my feed was just people brigading about some instance they don’t like. It’s ridiculous.

        • @idiomaddict
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          36 hours ago

          Sure, but trends seem to hit harder here, probably because we’re smaller. There have been weeks where it seemed like 60% of the non text posts in my feed were about jeans or beans or vegan cat food. Those probably weren’t more than 0.1% of posts, but they sure felt overwhelming at the time.

        • @Ledivin
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          -47 hours ago

          You can either face reality or not, literally nobody cares about your opinion on the matter. Many people who don’t join lemmy say this, that is simple fact.

    • Refurbished Refurbisher
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      14 hours ago

      Not necessailly federation, but I’ve seen a lot of people prejudge commenters for what instance they’re a part of, most commonly calling people from .ml or hexbear tankies just for being on .ml or hexbear. It gets old really quickly.

      • Meldrik
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        23 hours ago

        I don’t think that’s what the person on Reddit is referring to, but judging people by their choice of instance is dumb.

    • @TORFdot0
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      47 hours ago

      The people who aren’t here are making excuses to not be here. Otherwise they’d be here.

      That being said the feud between world and ml users is pretty noticeable