There have been various posts here in the last days describing how difficult it is for new people to start using Lemmy. In fact they are absolutely correct, it is much easier to get started on Reddit. But what many forget is that Lemmy is not a corporation employing dozens of full-time designers, running A/B-tests and so on. Lemmy is an open source project run by volunteers, with only @dessalines and me working on it full-time. Neither of us is a particularly good designer, and our time is mainly spent working on the backend (database, federation, api), and preparing the upcoming 1.0 release.
If you see anything on join-lemmy.org or in the Lemmy UI itself that could be improved, the best option is to make that improvement yourself. Both of them use standard web technologies (nodejs, tailwindcss, inferno etc). The userbase here is quite technical so there are many of you able to contribute. We rarely reject any pull requests as long as they make a real improvement. Though it usually requires a little back and forth to review the changes and then address the review comments.
You can find the source code for join-lemmy.org here and follow development instructions in the readme. Regarding the default Lemmy UI go here and read the documentation with development instructions. If you are not a developer you can still help, for example by improving the documentation. Additionally you can make changes to the texts for joinlemmy and lemmy-ui.
All this said, there have also been some suggestions to make onboarding easier by directing new users to a hardcoded default instance. This may sound like a good idea at first but won’t work well in practice. Running such an instance would take significant time for administration and moderation, but we maintainers are already too busy. Besides it would be impossible to reach an agreement who this default instance should federate with or how exactly it should be moderated. So if you want to get nontechnical users to Lemmy, the solution is to link them directly to a specific instance based on their interests.
You must log in or register to comment.
In terms of the “default instance” suggestion, I have an interesting hybrid suggestion. What about having an “easy on-ramp” instance where you get registered for one month with a hard-exit (auto-migrate to other instance, perhaps using some kind of federated-auth/token system for the migration, and forced password-setup on first use of the new instance). At any point during on-ramp the user could configure destination-instance from a list in the settings (or configure auto-export for manual import to any other “auto-migrate-unsupported” instance), with optional early-migration if the user has decided before the end of the month. Optionally a recommendation engine could iteratively curate a list of suggested instances based on usage during on-ramp (admins of those instances could provide - limited number of - tags of their choosing for the engine to use for matching). That part could be opt-in because probably a lot of users would find it creepy. The UX would need to be very user-friendly “pointy clicky” because that would be the overwhelming target demographic of such an instance. I think “on-boarding and educating” is better than “gatekeeping” (which feels like the “if you need to ask the price you can’t afford it” shopping trope). A nice side-effect is it already painlessly introduces users to the killer-feature “easy migration” between instances due to data-portability.
That would take a significant amount of work to implement, and we dont have the resources for it. But all the code is open source, so youre welcome to give it a try yourself.
The userbase here is quite technical so there are many of you able to contribute.
As a project manager, I can help by ballooning the scope and setting the deadline to yesterday! Doing my part!
Don’t forget about asking how the project is going too!
Didn’t be so hard on yourself. You can also pester us about the status of Jira tickets.
Also, why haven’t you closed that low priority ticket and you keep working the high priority tickets that are new.
I don’t really agree that it’s much easier to start on Reddit. Especially nowadays.
-Post from an IP that was once used by a banned account? Also banned (after first being shadowbanned)
-Try to post in any niche sub of your choosing after making an account? Forget it, wait three weeks and farm 3K karma first (which encourages shitposting and reposting, lowering quality)
-Deviate a fraction of an inch from whatever sub’s 500-page rulebook? Banned.
-Try to argue an unbanning? That’s a permanent mute.
-Post anything - and I do mean anything - in a “wrong” sub, get immediately permabanned by a slew of subs you didn’t even know existed.
-Some mod doesn’t agree with something you posted? Even if it was 5 years ago in a sub that has since been deleted? Banned and muted.
Reddit is an absolutely terrible experience for new posters. How they even manage to retain a tenth of them is beyond me. I encourage them to keep it up however, more traffic for Lemmy.
Also remember to be nice. I see heated arguments regressing into ad hominems by the third comment pretty regularly. We can be better than Reddit
I don’t have much to say, but thank you for working on lemmy all these years.
I can complain about it a lot sometimes, but I’m very grateful for both the communities and the developers that kickstarted the fediverse, and for free too! So, thank you ❤️
If you or other people want to discuss the development of fedisoftware for beginners, or just growing as a whole you and everyone else are more than welcome at !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com!
Good post
Also, !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com for people who want to help promoting Lemmy Mbin Piefed
I have nothing to add except I hope you’re still enjoying Lord of the Rings.
I do, although the sections in Mordor are a bit tedious to get through. But its worth it for all the details that were left out of the movies.
There’s still plenty more detail waiting for you after LotR!
I definitely plan to read the Silmarillion, because the history of middle earth sounds so interesting.
It’s a great book!
It’s worth it! I only read it last year and it gave me a whole new level of appreciation for the other stories.
It’s a very different style. I couldn’t slog through it
Hey if an old guy like me can figure it out its not hard .
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the effort to make joining Lemmy easier has some downsides. One of the nicest things about these communities is how easy it is to have good conversations with internet strangers. I’ve grown to appreciate and hope for Lemmy not trying to be a Reddit replacement. In fact, I’m totally fine with “the masses” staying in Spez’s data harvesting machine. If, one day, Lemmy gets as popular as Reddit, I think it will inevitably have many of the same problems. It just theoretically won’t be selling your data for profit (one hopes, anyway). My wife isn’t super-techy, and I explained the concept of Lemmy to my wife in about 10 minutes. She set up an account in about 5.
To me, it’s not that using or joining Lemmy is hard. It’s that a lot of people have come to loathe change. They’re told that Lemmy is “like Reddit,” so why leave Reddit, all their accumulated Internet points, and their familiar communities/echo chambers? Pretty much all of them also use other data-harvesting social media sites, so they mostly don’t care about that aspect. When I tell my friends about Lemmy I talk about how the size of the communities is really conducive to good conversations from wide enough ranges of opinions and experiences, compared to Reddit’s too much of everything including trolls.
I agree with the general feeling, but we could probably have a bit more activity while still keeping that feeling.
100k monthly active users would allow most of the communities promoted on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca to have more than one or two regular posters
Forgot to add that I’m not saying Lemmy is perfect as is. For sure there are things that can be improved and tweaked. And by all means, people who want to contribute should be encouraged and applauded. I’m just saying that the community that’s grown here is pretty great, and growth coming from slow-ish trickle of new users probably wouldn’t threaten that. Right now, Lemmy has a good late-90s, early 00s community feeling, and I really enjoy it.
One of the nicest things about these communities is how easy it is to have good conversations with internet strangers.
Maybe at that point people would use the Local feed more when they want to interact with their neighbors?
I do my part! (Throw a couple of PRS the devs way then go back to my goblin hole)
As someone who is “stuck” here after being permabanned on all accounts on reddit I can say that the number one “issue” Lemmy has is also the greatest part about Lemmy. The fact that every instance can have its own copy of the “same” sub.
I completely understand why someone coming from reddit is going to search up “ask” and they will see a few ask Lemmy subs coming up. At a glance they won’t know which one is “better” and why there are multiple.
Sadly most people will turn around and leave at that point. The average internet user will just go somewhere else the moment they feel lost or confused by anything. The few that might stick through it and make a post asking why there are multiple instances of the same type of sub are likely to be spoken down to by a bunch of condescending nerds that feel superior to outsider idiots. I know that many of you are very kind and welcoming, but enough of the user base are elitist pricks about everything that new users will notice immediately.
Lemmy can’t seem to decide if they want to grow or if they want to gate keep. I think the reality is that as more people are blanket banned from reddit without any reason such as myself that people will keep slowly trickling in.
The only “change” I think Lemmy needs is its user feedback. I have been banned from so many subs for completely unrelated things and without going and looking up the mod logs for my own name I wouldnt have any clue whatsoever. I would just think that Lemmy was broken constantly since it just gives you submitting errors instead of telling you that you have been banned or anything.
The “automod” messages are basically useless as they don’t tell you what rule you broke, which comment it was specifically or who actually initiated the ban. I know they aren’t always actually “automatic” bans because I have gotten messages from automod for comments I left weeks ago. So either they are the slowest and least attentive bots on planet earth or the mods of those subs are using the automod to hide behind as a layer of anonymity.
There are multiple similar subs on reddit as well though, often with very slightly different names
You make a good point. The key difference is that some instances block other instances (or at least that has been my understanding of how Lemmy works from my limited time here). So depending on where they sign up they might not even be able to access certain subs.
Plus the “duplicate” subs on reddit tend to be one of two reasons. The original moderators let the sub die or enough people didn’t get along with how the original sub was being moderated and they left to make their own copy. It’s pretty rare that there are two identical subs that have equal engagement.
It’s pretty rare that there are two identical subs that have equal engagement.
It’s rare here too
!movies@lemm.ee hs 1400 weekly active users
!movies@lemmy.world has 470
!fedigrow@lemm.ee discussed some consolidation in the past to centralize activity due to the smaller userbase
This is what I’m seeing so far. It seems very hard to find very active communities for various topics. Movies should be an easy one with broad appeal but even the ones you posted here are not that active.
And the seemingly most active one for television is called !showsandmovies@lemm.ee Why does it have movies in its name when the header is Shows and TV? Confusing and it’s not even that active.
That still doesn’t address the fact that not all instances are created equal. And it’s not immediately apparent which instances block others.
I usually go with
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
That way people are pointed to two reliable instances.
Thank you for your work :) I’m not sure I’ll have time for this, but I’ll try to check what I can improve on the UI. Where can I find the sources for the “alternative UI”?
- https://a.lemmy.world/ - Alexandrite UI
- https://photon.lemmy.world/ - Photon UI
- https://m.lemmy.world/ - Voyager mobile UI
- https://old.lemmy.world/ - A familiar UI
There is usually an about page with the source link, or the joinlemmy apps page should have a link.
Yes, I asked too fast. It was quite easy to find out. Thus said, those are complete reforge of the UI, so that’s a lot more work.
Thank you for this post and encouragement. I am open to volunteering my time and talents to help people find Lemmy.
However, after the work is done, it would be fantastic if you all could invest in advertising. I know that Google and Bing aren’t great but if I had to guess, search trend for “reddit alternatives” is probably rising and Lemmy is in a great spot to provide reddit refuges a life raft.
