In other places on around the web, (chiefly /r/RedditAlternatives) whenever Lemmy is brought up, invariably I see the exact same complaints from brand new accounts.
Lemmy is too complicated, it wont gain traction, can’t figure out how to use it, can’t log in, etc.
Now, I’m definitely more tech savvy than the average redditor, but I just don’t see the complaints. You can go to any Lemmy site, instantly start doomscrolling with a familiar UI, and sign up on all the instances I’ve tried has been frankly more simple than making a new reddit account. The only real complaint I have is the generally smaller volume of users and posts.
My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.
Ideally, the first link someone sees when googling Lemmy would be a global feed on a fairly generic instance, with a basic tagline akin to ‘front page of the internet.’ End users don’t need to care about the technical details, at least not until they’re interested in the platform.
So is this “Lemmy is too confusing” sentiment even real? And if not, what motive would there be to astroturf this?
If it is a real issue affecting would-be users, how can we address it?
Just a reminder that Reddit was once difficult for people to understand.
To be honest though, I’m a bit disappointed by the other users here. The quality of comments is really poor, both idiotic and adversarial. I’m talking fox news comment section level.
I’ve been seeing waaaay too much unwarranted vitriol and anger in comments lately, for things that really aren’t that big a deal (like Linux vs windows) and I find it disappointing. As a community we should want Lemmy to grow, and yes that does mean we will get more “normie” posts, but imo that’s good and if someone doesn’t like it they can use more niche community spaces, which there will be more of with a larger userbase.
for things that really aren’t that big a deal (like Linux vs windows)
LOL, Linux vs. Windows flame wars are literally as old as the World Wide Web, and UNIX vs. DOS flame wars are even older than that. Welcome to traditional Internet culture, undiluted by normies.
(Also, I would argue that copyleft Free Software vs. proprietary software riddled with spying, ads, and other user-hostile dark patterns is a way bigger deal than you’re giving it credit for, but that’s a topic for a different thread.)
Push back when you see it. Remind them that we have a chance to reset, and they don’t have to act the same way here that they did on reddit.
Reddit at this point a psyop for multiple different countries, political parties, celebrities, influenzars and such. US, Israel, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and others have Internet task force to push propaganda and limit negative PR.
Votes aren’t public in reddit and is a great cover for hiding any coordinated influence. Keep creating new accounts, make it seem natural by posting on random subs, use old accounts for posts/comments and new accounts for votes. To an unsuspecting user, nothing seems out of ordinary.
On ActivityPub all votes are public and manipulation can be detected or analyzed now or in future. Instance admins could check this and see a pattern. And there are many many many instances, so any one might run into something.
Also mod logs are public in lemmy, unlike reddit. Censorship from mods and admins are already a constant cause for drama but makes it a lot more transparent for the community.
So it’s less influential. So, they try to dissuade people from making Lemmy and Mastodon less interesting.
I’m not saying it’s not possible here, but it’s too early and needs a lot more work than reddit. People already do not interact with users from instances they dislike. You already see some patterns in how users of instance behave and avoid them.
Although since Lemmy votes are public, it does take some restraint to not message people that downvote your comments/posts and ask them why.
You can see who voted your comments? How? I don’t think I can.
They’re visible to all the server admins. The difference is that anyone can make their own instance and connect to the network as an admin
Stupid people thinking little Lemmy is too complicated to use is a feature not a bug. If someone can’t figure out how to use the Lemmy interface why would we even want them here?
We got a glimpse of what a true exodus could look like, and I’m with you. As much as I’d love to see Reddit collapse from its own shittiness, for Lemmy’s sake I’d rather see a trickle who have a chance to learn manners and leave their vitriol behind.
Not saying Lemmy’s perfect. I’m not saying I’m perfect: I have bad days and make asshole responses, too. But they get swallowed, or I get a reasonable response and I apologize. In the main, the real, consistent excuses for human beings who resist the opportunity to become better people tend to join instances like Hexbear, and can be blocked en mass.
No one deserves to be called stupid just because they struggle with an objectively poor onboarding process and gate keeping.
I am perfectly able to navigate Lemmy’s interface and I still think it’s a pile of Garbage. It suffers from the same problem most projects suffer from. Designed by a programmer not a UX designer.
Also I would rather enjoy if Lemmy didn’t just become an echo chamber of extremism in the opposite direction of reddit. Cause at this rate Lemmy is already becoming a cess pit of echo chambers and extreme levels of gate keeping.
For that you need a board spectrum of people. Including those you seem “stupid”.
So fuck off with your gate keeping. Be helpful and set a good example.
Nah gatekeeping is good. I agree this place and the fediverse in general are massive echo chambers and that’s bad, but the more of the general public that gets on a platform the worse it gets. Obviously you can’t have an IQ filter or a test to get on, so a janky hard to use interface is good enough to scare away Facebook drones and brainrot zombies.
Agree. Some people are just too dumb to own a computer. Giving them access to internet is like giving a Kalashnikov to a monkey.
If the fediverse has any chance at properly succeeding it must create a “front page” for each alternative. Lemmy for reddit for example. There is no reason why all of lemmy can’t have a front page like old.lemmy.world with each community/platform on lemmy being connected and allowing for ease of access unlike what it is currently where you need a different account for every single Lemmy site
you need a different account for every single Lemmy site
What are you talking about? You are using a lemmy.world account to comment in a lemmy.ml community right now.
I think its surviorship bias: the people who understand lemmy are on lemmy, not reddit.
Most of us are on both, because Lemmy still isn’t big enough
I’m on both to evangelise lemmy.
Yes. Of course the big platforms actively seek to undermine competitors. There’s billions of dollars at stake. Something that really convinced me was reading about how Facebook ran VPN services to spy on traffic so they could spot budding competitor platforms.
We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular. Something I’m not convinced they ever stopped doing. I believe reddit corporate still bots their own site for whatever purpose they require in the moment. I absolutely believe they troll their own site. Remember spez is the guy who live edits the production database.
I used facebook way too much and the thing that got me to finally delete my account in 2011 was I had made a post about discovering diaspora and linking my account. Hung out with a friend a month or two later and he loaded up my facebook profile and could see every post I had ever made except the one about a federated facebook alternative.
Veering a little off-topic now, but facebook contacts being my irl friends made that feel so dangerous to me. If half my friends have opinion A and the other half opinion B, then if one opinion is entirely censored but I still see everything posted matching the approved opinion, that will have an enormous sway over how my worldview develops, in a way different from seeing strangers agreeing on those same things.
Maybe, but I believe in Occam’s razer. The simplest solution is probably correct.
The average user is incredibly lazy. Insanely lazy. Reddit has taught them that they should be just spoonfed content constantly with no assistance. People aren’t used to going out to find communities anymore. To them even these basic concepts are then “frustrating” and “complex”. It’s unfortunate, but that’s really how lazy they are.
They can’t go to the search bar, type in television, and hit subscribe, it’s literally too much for them.
People are ready for alternatives to Reddit, Twitter, Facebook… Can a community on reddit shutdown, and seamlessly transfer to lemmy within a few days while archiving the subreddits history? Will the new Lemmy be hands off moderation at the site level so that conversation can be had? If you can give people a yes to both people will join.
Sure, but the complaints I see are never “I don’t see content there that I like”, it’s always “its too complicated and I can’t sign up/see content at all”
but if you make it to any Lemmy site, you’re right there on the home feed instantly, same as reddit.
So is it really a problem of users not even making it to an instance? Are they really all getting brick-walled by join-lemmy.org, or is something else going on here?
There is an increasing difficulty to even find out that join-lemmy.org exists.
To be fair join-lemmy.org also is a rather awful bit of user onboarding. It’s very much a programmer design. Which is something all of Lemmy suffers from.
There’s fine line between a good design, and over simplification. But Lemmy is pretty firmly a mile away playing in the “it works” pool.
Also, Lemmy has ways of discovering communities. Just browse the all-local or all-federated feeds and you’ll see what communities are popular.
The “can’t sign up” complaints might have something to do with how most instances make you answer questions like “why do you want to sign up” and “what communities will you browse” as a simple way of stopping automated sign-ups, and if they didn’t put anything in the box or just said things like “IDK I’m from Reddit” they might have been rejected due to the admins thinking they’re a bot or spammer or something.
Gonna throw in my personal conspiracy theory (that I don’t have any evidence for): I haven’t been on Reddit Alternatives since I found Lemmy, but based on what i remember, there seem to be quite a few people who have spun up their own projects and are promoting them pretty hard on that subreddit. Who’s to say if one or more of them decided to buy bot comments to smear their competitors?
Yeah, that’s the type of motive I was struggling to find. I could absolutely see that happening.
I think a good chunk of them are just confused by going to join-lemmy and not be given a sign up in their face. Sure, we know that about 5 seconds of reading comprehension skill would get them where they want to go, but the vast majority of users don’t have that. Look how many people will walk up to a cash register/till with a sign on it that says “credit card only” and then be confused that they don’t take cash. Most people don’t read anymore.
I think you described short form video like reels, tiktok, shorts users as well perfectly.
Most of the negative answers on /r/RedditAlternatives are either botted or bad faith.
!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com to see a few examples
I have zero tech skills and I’m here I do think the emails back and forth to get my original log in was obnoxious, it literally took days, and I have no idea how to start communities, I have no idea what the “federation” or “fediverse” is, I don’t understand “instances” and I really do miss Reddit for how easy all those things are but I figure eventually I’ll get it and this will feel like home. If all you want to do is make an account to scroll it’s pretty easy but I do agree everything else is hard/obnoxious and it will definitely slow down growth. That said I was on reddit since almost the beginning and growing quickly only came in the past several years and it really destroyed the site, so growing slowly isn’t inherently a bad thing. I do wish there was simple videos to watch on things like how to make a community though
Hmm, good idea, is there a ‘newtolemmy’ community?
Actually there is
I’m probably the least tech savvy person on Lemmy. If my dumb ass can figure it out, the subset of Reddit’s population who we’d actually want in Lemmy’s community should have no problem.
That said, onboarding could have been better, and you’re right about the potential hangups: “fediverse” sounds like some kind of federal government function like a hub website that links to all the different .gov agencies, and “Lemmy” sounds like a cartoon character. Choosing an instance was more stressful than it probably should have been; ultimately went with .world by blindly following the advice of a YouTube video, but on day 1 I was pretty oblivious to the extremist shit that’s associated with instances like .ml and had no clue what ‘tankie’ even meant.
That was two years ago though - no idea if that reflects what getting started is like today.
And again, that’s all coming from a relatively tech-dumbass, so I’d imagine it’s probably smoother for people less prone to starting a fire when they turn their computer turns on.
Edit: sorry to anyone who had to read that before the edit… when I’m tired I have an annoying tendency to think a word as I’m typing and then just skip to the next one. And I’m tired all the fucking time, so my posts have a lot of holes Q_Q
Has not changed one bit. If anything the onboarding experience has gotten worse.
Lemmy isnt new user hostile so to speak but it sure doesn’t try not to be.
And God, the number of times iv had to explain that frediverse doesn’t have anything to do with the feds is insane.
Lemmy has some of the worse terminology.
I have no idea what the instances even are, I didn’t realize it mattered, I just picked one at random. I still have no idea what they are or why it matters
If you’re interested, the short version is that instances (A.K.A servers) are run by different people in different places. A reason to move instances might be:
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My admin, the owner of the instance, has been doing things I heavily disagree with (bans, blocks, etc)
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I don’t agree with the rules on my instance.
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The instance is run in a country which criminalizes something that I care about, and so has to ban discussion of that thing (piracy, porn, etc).
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I want to run a community on a specific instance for whatever reason, and so need an account there
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And it’s okay! No need to understand those at first
My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.
The thing is, that’s a fundamental feature of Lemmy. It’s designed such that no one person or company controls the whole thing. Admins that have differing opinions can each have their own servers with whatever rules they want.
That makes it somewhat incompatible with a a basic signup page like what you’re proposing, just like you can’t have a generic “sign up for email” page without picking a specific provider. Having a huge number of users on a single server somewhat defeats the purpose of decentralization - you’re back to a small number of people / a company having control over a major part of the ecosystem.
Perhaps it could redirect people to a randomly selected instance from a hand-picked list, but maybe that’d be even more confusing? I’m not sure.
Realistically the solution would be instances moving away from the Lemmy ‘brand’. You could more easily direct users to a specific one and fast track newbies past all the fediverse details.
If we go with the email analogy, people rarely ever search for ‘email’, they just go to the specific ones they know. Then searching for lemmy gets you to places like join-lemmy.org that cares about the ecosystem, while terms analogous to gmail directs you more to a specific instance.
And I think this sort of branding model actually more compatible with the idea of decentralization. As a culture, I think we would better serve federation by directly linking and promoting our preferred instances, rather than harping on about federation and the lemmyverse.
If we go with the email analogy, people rarely ever search for ‘email’, they just go to the specific ones they know.
I get it, but everyone going to gmail is not a good thing and never has been. The paradigm shift is more meaningful than simply growing lemmy as a community. Without that, the only difference from a mainstream social network today would be a handful of big players rather than just one.
Realistically the solution would be instances moving away from the Lemmy ‘brand’
This is a great idea, and I think some instances do this. I seem to remember Beehaw taking this approach. Similar to forums - each forum has a different name even if they use the same software.
The tricky part for regular users to understand is that if they sign up on one server, they can still access content on others. Old-school internet users that used to use Usenet would understand it (Usenet functioned the same way) but the majority of users are used to centralized services these days, which makes it hard.
When I first signed up here, or tried to sign up here, join-lemmy just didn’t want to load anything. So I ended up going to bed and trying again the next morning. The next morning, it finally loaded the list of instances and going by the experience I had just had with the website battling to even load anything, I chose an instance advertised as “join here to reduce load on larger instances”. And this instance just didn’t want to load anything properly. Half of the images in posts just weren’t showing up. And when I searched LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, only dead communities showed up and I’m pretty sure nothing from Blåhaj.
Then I went to world and still found it to be a ghost town. Eventually I realised that it was because ‘English’ wasn’t selected in my language settings. Because I didn’t realise that you have to ctrl click to select both ‘undefined’ and ‘English’. I’ve used software where you have to ctrl click but I’m not sure I’ve ever come across another website where this is the case. And on this note, the whole fact that ‘undefined’ even exists as an option comes across as bush league and makes it look like a beta version.
Then there’s another issue here. The god damn internal politics. So someone signs up on the insurance that says “focused on programming and development”, then have everyone calling them a tankie or be cut off from multiple instances that have de-federated. It’s clear to me now that ‘ml’ stands for “Marxist Leninist” but when you’re new here and just looking at descriptions in join-lemmy, it just looks like a unique url like all the others.
Personally I think there’s a lot of reasons that people would give up trying to get started here. That’s before even trying to break them ice with a silly question in AskLemmy and getting snarky snark and smart asses in the replies. And I use that as an example because in my first week here, I saw someone post an innocent question in AskLemmy, get hostility as a response, then leave.
The English + Undefined issue is indeed a nasty issue that makes half of the content disappear for a reason that’s not easy to figure out. It really should be a separate checkbox of whether to show or hide posts where the language is not labelled. I do think that Undefined is selected by default now, but might still get unselected if the language setting is clicked and changed.
For those people saying “Ctrl+Click, should be obvious”, that won’t work at all on mobile web UI.
There are language settings? I signed up through the voyager app and I didn’t see any language settings, is that why I can’t see anything other laguages?
I’ve used software where you have to ctrl click but I’m not sure I’ve ever come across another website where this is the case
This is the standard behaviour on the web for lists where you can select multiple options. See the example here for instance: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/select#advanced_select_with_multiple_features
Most sites have a custom version though, since the built-in HTML element has such a poor user experience. I really wish browsers would just switch it to be a list with checkboxes.
The behaviour was based on Windows desktop apps in the 90s (where this behaviour was way more common), but after a while, most things switched to checkbox lists instead.
The behaviour was based on Windows desktop apps in the 90s
Ah, so that’s why it was chosen as the default here.
Yeah I don’t think the multi-select listboxes have really changed much since the days of Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape Navigator. Out of all the standard form components you can use in HTML, it’s probably the one most in need of improvements.
I see this about mastodon like, a lot. “Oh it’s so hard to pick a server” - they literally have a big default server and you can move any time you want, it’s not hard. Often this is in comparison to bluesky which is… Also claiming that it will support multiple servers one day, and so aims to develop the exact same issue?
The fediverse is too complicated which I said in detail on my post on c/fediverse currently its a mess each domain has hundreds of different sites that aren’t interconnected and where you need to create a new account on each. If Lemmy had a front page like reddit and allowed for all its smaller communities to be coded and personalized to be completely different while allowing the top 25 posts every 24 hours to pop up and allowing a place to search for a specific community. We could still allow an approval process for specific communities but reddit would fall in months with how mods at reddit currently behave
Tip for you since it sounds you are genuinely trying it out but are running into issues: you can post and comment on outside Lemmy communities without creating a different account for the most part. Just navigate to lemmy.world/c/[community name]@[other site domain]. Example: https://lemmy.world/c/science_memes@mander.xyz means you can interact with the community on mander.xyz while staying on your lemmy.world account.
A Lemmy server agnostic link can be made in the form of ![community name]@[other site domain]. Example: !science_memes@mander.xyz, or !fediverse@lemmy.world to help people from anywhere on lemmy to link to c/fediverse.
There’s still a lot of gaps like official methods to redirect post and comment links to your instance (I heard it was coming soon) It is indeed behind Reddit in a lot of technical and social aspects, but I think it’s not completely a bad thing.
Source?
What are you, a cop?
I just want to see what the OP is talking about without having to browse reddit myself.
How dare someone ask for something like… facts and evidence.
My anti-lemmy sentiment comes from raw experience like dumbfuck comments and witnessing the extent of ACAB brainrot.
Okay, well you know where the exit is.
The barrier to creating an account is too high.
If there was an account migration option it would be possible to throw users into a random instance which federates with everyone and later let them migrate with their account age and post history.
How is a person supposed to know which instance to choose before knowing what each instance is even about?
They’re not. One can join any instance they like. But its like “what brand of toilet paper is someone to buy when they move out?” Thats for you to figure out. Ask someone, try a couple and settle for what helps you most.
That said, account migration would be nice although the possible issues are pretty brutal. An account is mostly a bunch of posts, comments and subscriptions. Reposting them would be fatal, relinking them would be dangerous. Only the subscriptions would be easy to move and i think that exists already.
I see your point. But imo its technically not really feasible.
No there are activation periods as well. Mods have to approve your account. You can’t just jump in and get to know the place. There are so many different barriers to entry. And this is for people not even knowing whether Lemmy is a good place to go.
Maybe a LemmyAnon “tutorial” instance to dump all the users with no verification and let them get to know Lemmy before choosing an instance?
A single activation period for the account is honestly way better than what Reddit has where you’re not allowed to post in a ton of large subreddits because you don’t have enough karma when your account is created.
But people cannot sign in to the account while awaiting activation. This is a turnoff because people will leave and not come back when their account is activated.
A better option would be letting them sign in but only giving them comment/posting rights when their application gets approved.
Removed by mod
