This was originally built to explain Meta’s P92 to some people, and I slightly edited it to make it a bit more general. It starts with Twitter, then Mastodon, then the Fediverse as a whole in what I hope is an intuitive manner, and requires no “tech literacy” outside of knowing what Twitter and Facebook are like.
No tech literacy is nice but the user experience of communities when first joining Lemmy needs a lot of work.
First you have to choose an instance and no context is given. What’s the difference between x, y, and z? It’s federated so it seems easy to dismiss but we’re asking users to choose something with no help at all before doing anything else.
If commenters link directly to a community and don’t use a shared link, it is very confusing why it looks like you are signed out and can’t subscribe. This took me a bit to figure out and I have to either manually adjust the url to fit my instance or search for it which can be unreliable.
Duplicate community names across multiple instances is also confusing, although I welcome the multiple choice nature of it. But to a new user it can be confusing as to which is the “right” choice. Content moderation varies across the instances too.
I love Lemmy and once I figured it out I found it pretty easy. But let’s stop pretending that this site is so easy to use. There are quite a few user experiences that could be smoothed out with just a little bit of help text or additional context.