I don’t think it’s UI issue. I think it’s a traffic issue.

People go to a social media site because it’s where everyone else is.

But the nature of the federation is that you end up with silos of traffic, and those silos are too small to keep content flowing, which stifles community engagement and subsequently growth. For every 10 people that see a post, one will like it enough to vote on it. Out of those people, 1 in 10 will be engaged enough to actually post. If they post and get no response, they lose interest in re-posting.

The strength of Reddit was that it allowed everyone to talk about everything at once, and it became the de-facto hub of the internet for many folks. You go onto /r/all and you’d get the sense that the world is there, flowing past. You don’t really get that on lemmy or mastodon servers unless you make an active effort to go and subscribe to things.

A solution to this is, actually, more federation. Many lemmy instances could band together by building a front page interface that combined all of the best posts across servers. This would improve the speed and flow of content dramatically. Think of it as alliance like the old web-rings of the early days of the internet, but in this situation, you’re posting the content of all your allied federated servers, and they’re posting yours. Thus, when someone goes to lemmy.world, they really see the whole world of lemmy, not just this one instance.

This would draw in new users more than any interface update, IMHO. It also would serve as a great place for them to start to discover what they want to subscribe to and participate in, providing a far wider choice than any one instance on its own can provide.