- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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?
Potential hot take: Do we even want the majority of people here?
No. Too much attention here would be a bad thing with governments the world over leaning toward authoritarianism.
That’s a pretty good point. If it’s “too hard” to join up on here that sure is a good filter to keep out the Facebook ding dongs.
Eternal September.
I still recall the digg migration.
Sort of a hypocrite through cause I’m part of the Reddit 3rd Party API migration…
Not necessarily, but we don’t want a accidental filter that filters out non tech savvy people. We want all kinds of people on Lemmy
Hell, it can filter out tech people too. I’m a programmer by trade, but I almost dipped on lemmy because the onboarding is confusing enough. Like, I obviously (mostly) figured it out, but I did consider going “eh fuck it” and dipping. The site is ultimately a luxury and not a requirement, so effort or confusion required to get all started up is also something that’ll drive me to consider it not all worth it for some social media I’m not even sure I want to be a part of yet.
It’s not difficult though. They just can’t be arsed and are making excuses for being comfortable and lazy. If there was a $100 million marketing budget and their favourite celebrity was here, they’d sit an hour long entrance exam. The best we can do is make it fun enough here that people want to comment.
We should try to do both, give a good UX and make it fun.
Everyone benefits from good UX
Exactly. If this minimal effort is keeping people out - GOOD. If you can’t put the bare minimum effort in, then you’ll just be another mindless TikTok type person and we really don’t need those.
A counterargument to this is that a lot of people (who would put in the minimal effort) don’t come here instead of Reddit because their niche community isn’t represented well. So while it’s nice to have higher effort/engagement members, you can’t possibly cover all of what most people want to see without a lot of those.
I don’t really want them here, but I’d rather them be here than on reddit. Reddit is more toxic than this place and a lot of that comes top down. At least here people can spin off an instance the minute admins/mods act like dicks. There, the culture just gets worse and festers and it contributes to toxicity in the world outside itself. Imagine if the r/theDonald pricks have been ostracized and started their own instance which most instances defederated with quickly.
Thats my view, I prefer that Lemmy is small, I’ve had enough of the greater internet tbh
I still have to add ‘reddit’ to my searches when looking for niche issues, opinions, and reviews.
Would hope in the future I can add ‘lemmy’ instead and be rid of reddit for good
Yes, I want my niche communities back.
It would be nice to have thriving communities for niche things. That can only really happen when there’s decent numbers though. I do understand the hesitation though.
A much larger userbase will bring its own problems for instance admins, where I’m sure it’ll start turning into full-time jobs to keep the lights on.