- Exclude explicit software bugginess or missing features
- Include experiences or knock-on effects that may have arisen from (1)
- Comparisons to Reddit are ok. We know the reasons for the differences, but this is just about expressing yourself
As a general rule, the onboarding and discovery in the fediverse is pretty bloody terrible.
It has to exist to be terrible.
Its just super unattractive to join. If I am thinking about joining a platform I want to know if there is content that is interesting to me. Now if I go to https://join-lemmy.org/ what do I see? It greets me with explanations of the Licensing, tells me all the programming languages and frameworks, shows me pictures of code and something about mod tools and of course immediately offers me to run my own server. None of that is even remotely interesting to me even now that I am a registered user. Not to mention that the design is questionable. Then it says “Join a server”. I am not here to join a server, I am here to join a platform. And if I click on that I am met with about 50 different instances, of which I have no idea what to choose and what implications my choice has.
The whole federation thing, the design, everything is just unintuitive and unattractive to join.
I tried to solve this a tiny little bit by giving my own instance a clean and friendly frontpage, but I think I still need to do more work to attract people who aren’t fedi-inclined.
I like that front page, nice for a ‘smaller instance’ that has a specific target. I should steal it for no.lastname.nz
Please feel free! Source is on GitHub, it uses Astro with the Starlight template.
I love this landing page. Great job!
Thank you!
I agree that it is unclear to folks that Lemmy is not a platform and this causes frustration and disappointment for new users. It probably should be clearer on join-lemmy.org that this whole thing is just a bunch of servers talking to each other.
It’s absolutely a platform, it’s just not centralized.
join-lemmy.org needs some serious work if it’s really what people are going to link when others ask about it; it’s really no wonder that we’ve mostly only amassed technical folks. I also think the default UI/UX could use a lot of work to bring it up to standards with other modern social sites. I wish that would be a priority for the devs, but I know they only have so much time to devote to things
Can make this argument for email…
Which is why no one is running their own email server and people go to the platform that is easiest and most well known.
Email has the benefit of legacy. Lemmy does not.
The “front page” of lemmy, either the local of the instance you’re on or the “all”, is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I’m not sure what the issue is with lemmy’s front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?
It’s too bad because the “front page” is the user’s first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.
In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.
The front page of Reddit is one of the places I’ve actively avoided. That’s the place where I’ll find everything that the rest of the world likes to see, but none of the stuff that I care about. I tend to be interested in strange niche topics, and my multireddits reflected that quite clearly. To me, the front page of Lemmy is about as boring as the front page of Reddit, so no big changes there.
Yeh for the last few years especially of my using Reddit I would only ever go directly to the 4-5 subs that I frequented. Never once went to the home page/“all”, or the new discover page or whatever it is.
For now I’m using All on here to try and find some communities to join, and which ones to block. I’d say in a few months I’ll just be using Subscribed.
In order to discover interesting places I just went to https://lemmyverse.net/communities and joined every community with an interesting name, such as science, technology, physics etc.
I strongly agree that it needs to improve. Besides the sorting algorithm issues, one issue is that “all” depends on what people on your instance have subscribed to. So small instances might not have much or have a very biased all. I think Lemmy should at least default to basically subscribing to the N biggest communities for all instances, purely to seed the “all” view.
As well, most instances should default to “all”, because “local” is usually going to be extremely limited and misleading. Defaulting to local will just make the fediverse look bad. New users aren’t going to realize they can switch to all. They’ll just think there’s barely any content and leave.
Some sorting would be good. I’d also like to be able to hide posts without having to block the poster. Right now there is very little user control.
The worldnews thing is the biggest problem right now because the threads just get brigaded so consistently. And lemmy.ml, which has one of the biggest worldnews forums, has a soft ban on the world’s biggest ongoing news story.
Lemmy has no algorithm.
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That’s not really what I was referring to. Sure it selects posts automatically but it’s not like it picks what it thinks a specific user is going to click on.
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but it is just a simple vote count/time decay, no consideration given to what you have interacted with in the past, ie the “algorithm” on other platforms
That’s why the content isn’t sorted as well as it could be. There’s no one-size-fits-all for social media as people have different things they like.
Yes there is, and it’s not that different from reddit. The sorting algorithm is what they refer to. Eg, hot is some balance of time vs votes, which greatly favours newer posts (too new, IMO – posts it shows will typically no comments or maybe just one or two). Active favours high commenting rates and based on my observations, it seems to drop off around 2 days (too old, IMO – a considerable number of posts shown by this algorithm seem to be around the 2 day mark). The top and new algorithms are straightforward enough.
All the algorithms favour big communities. There’s a “best” algorithm in development, which would try to look at the top for each community and thus give smaller communities a chance. I can’t wait for that, because right now, you’ll rarely if ever see a small community hit the front page and it sucks bad.
One thing I’ve noticed that I feel might become an issue eventually is that occasionally someone will have something they really want to be seen, so they sort of cross-post it to every related community in every instance they can all at the same time, so it shows up in your feed a dozen times from a dozen different places and it takes sometimes a day or more to get fully pushed out of the way.
I’ve only seen it happen a few times so far so it’s not currently a major issue, but I can definitely see the potential for abuse there. As more people join you’ll inevitably start to get more of the marketers and influencers and eventually corporations showing up, and they tend to bring all their bots and tools and various ways of gaming the system so it’d suck if the whole feed ends up being just the same 3-4 things posted into dozens of places for the whole day.
I’m sure there are ways to filter those sorts of things out, but I think the challenge is going to be to find a way to keep it under control without putting too much on the user, so they don’t have to be constantly tweaking their settings and blocklists, and so that new users who just browse without having an account yet don’t just see an unappealing wall of nonsense.
Hopefully that doesn’t end up being the case, but that seems to be the way it trends when you add more people in my experience.
Yeah this has to be my number one criticism at the moment. It’s a bit of a catch 22: you want a steady stream of quality content, so you subscribe to multiple communities of the same name so nothing falls through the cracks, and then posters post to multiple related or same-named communities so nobody misses it 🤷♂️
I agree that is a vulnerability that will be exploited soon. Not sure the best way to combat it. Perhaps a crossposting limit/cost/penalty would discourage it.
This bears deeper thought though because since there’s no karma (let there never be), new accounts can bypass costs/limits from more permissive instances.
Good point and I hope to see more discussion around this. It actually seems kind of serious now I ponder on it.
It’s already a thing. I scrolled New this morning and it was just a wall of the same story posted all over by some shit bot. This needs to be figured out asap.
Discovering communities is easily the #1 complaint, I don’t think it’s a technical issue, it feels mostly a conceptual issue with how everything works. I understand why duplicate communities exist because of how the Fediverse works, but in practice it’s pretty annoying to the users. For example I tried to look for an anime community just to see if there’s any discussion, but I had no idea where people were.
There’s anime@lemmy.ml, this looks like the most popular but it’s mostly repost bots. There’s anime@lemmy.world and ani_me@lemmy.world, both of which barely have users. There’s anime@kbin.social, which has some threads going on but few users.
Because of the amount of duplicates nobody knows where the users actually are. Since everyone’s confused, nobody participates because they feel like nobody else is going to see their content. On Reddit you had one definitive subreddit for each topic, on Lemmy it feels like a guessing game at times which one’s the right one.
We’re settling into communities more as time goes on (like how !moviesandtv@lemmy.film is the definitive movie/tv hub), but I think we’ve got a ways to go. If Lemmy wants to go more mainstream it needs to tackle this, whether it’s through multi-reddit style communities that combines feeds or some way to combine comments on crossposts or maybe some other way.
Yes, the world fracturing creates a bunch of duplicate islands. They need to overlap.
The Fediverse is rather different. I’m sure there will develop some sort of sign posting system to point out where to go but by its very nature, it will be subjective. Perhaps some sort of vivacity score could be used to judge how alive a community is and some way to show all communities across all instances in a say top 10 listing. In time communities with the same broad focus will develop a particular or set of focuses (foci, focae - not for me). Time will tell.
Lemmy is different to the walled gardens and it needs to mature and develop its own way of doing things. I love the fact that the largest instance went down with a bang for a while and the rest carried on fine. I feel for lemmy.world residents and admins - I’m a sysadmin myself. However that demonstrates the sheer power of the fediverse. I will be spinning up an instance eventually, once I’ve got the hang of using it and I run some quite important stuff at work.
Tools and memes will develop over time but make no mistake, the fediverse has hit its teens in life. What sort of adult we get will be interesting. We do need to keep it out of the hands of a single authority whilst still allowing civilized discussion, for a given value of civilized. Instances can refuse to peer with others so we can gradually develop networks that work for subsets of the human race. The tricky bit is enabling this to happen within earthly laws and boundaries. Governments hate decentralization for obvious reasons. Instead of Messrs Apple, Google, MS etc they potentially have to deal with me and you and the other n billion people on the planet!
It has sort of been said already, but I didn’t find a reply stating my exact criticism so I’ll chime in. Lemmy and the fediverse is confusing. Instances, federation, de-federating, and all the other techno-garble is not something most internet users have any frame of reference for and I imagine it is very off-putting to a vast majority of potential users.
I’m not usually one to harp on user experience but it’s just a mess trying to get into this whole thing. I was driven by a hatred for reddit to figure it out and I’m a software developer by trade, but still was scratching my head at wtf all these terms were and how it all works. Lemmy and the fediverse desperately needs some onboarding/marketing work and to ditch this sentiment of “if you can’t figure it out then we don’t want you here.”
100%. Mass adoption really needs “easy”. From an average user experience, Reddit is instantly useable.
I do want to mention that despite what I said above, I think apps are doing a good job at making exploration kinda easier. Been digging wefwef/voyager and looking forward to Boost and Sync to check out.
Agreed, though I think it’s less “we don’t want you here” and more “you’re on your own”. I liken it to Linux in that sense where new users are expected to try harder to learn the ins and outs. The difference is with Linux what you learn can be applied in so many more places in your Linux experience. With Lemmy, once you grasp the technical depth of it there’s not much you can do with it except explain it to another person.
I tried to explain it to my parents this past weekend, and I did not do a good job (because I only like 70% get it in the first place).
For me, you can’t separate those two things. I want an online identity. I don’t want to switch servers because of whatever reason and have to import bookmarks. I want my app to keep track of my subscriptions and just give me my replies/messages. I don’t want to care whether I’m on lemmy.ml or whatever
Have my upvote good sir/madam/other. Use it in good health!
As an old, I just realized why the time I spend on Lemmy is less soul-destroying than equivalent time on Reddit.
I enjoy searching for topics of interest more than being spoonfed content. So in this respect, the difficulty of Lemmy is the point.
I get it that this is an aging hipster point of view, so really we are fighting for the soul of Lemmy.
How much appeal do we really want?
How fast do we want to grow?
What order should major features be implemented in? (Let alone the debate over which features.)
This debate will never end. Get used to the defederation wars. It is akin to “Am I my brother’s keeper”? This is among the first questions asked in Genesis and God declined to answer. We will fight about it till the end of time.
My best hope is that enough quality instances host quality communities that I can curate my own experience to make so-called social media serve me, not a tech company.
I thought that was the point?
Join us at lemmy.world/c/tinnedseafood! Or is it !tinnedseafood. But don’t I need the instance too? This is part of the problem!
This is a feature, not a bug. Yes you need the instance as well as the community name. This is akin to complaining that you can’t type in a URL without including the TLD (*.com, *.org, *.wtevs).
I am open to an explanation how you can expect to find a community without both pieces of information. There may be a less confusing way to structure the links, but the community name and instance name are basically required for a federated system.
Links between instances often don’t work as intended, and there’s no good way to redirect me from
some-other-instance.pub/c/cool-communitytomy-instance.pub/c/cool-community@some-other-instance.pubautomatically.deleted by creator
Looks nice. Some us browse on mobile though.
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Thanks, I’ll try it out!
This is something we have a workaround on an extension I’m working on. You can right-click on a link and have it open in your home instance
Thanks, this is lovely!
Wow. All the top comments are about finding / joining / onboarding.
It’s just super unattractive to join.
Discovering communities is easily the #1 complaint
Onboarding is unclear for peopleI genuinely don’t understand this criticism about the fediverse. It seems like people just want to be told what to do. I totally understand that this isn’t a vertical platform like Reddit or Twitter but that doesn’t prevent anyone from participating in the platform. It just means that you need to look for what you’re interested in rather than be told what you should be interested in.
Multiple communities with the same theme in diverse servers mean lots of repeated information in my home page.
I’ve commented recently about the redundancy of communities - which I think is a related criticism to knowing what community to join (as opposed to instance). If I’m on this instance but another instance has a community of the same name, which should I join? Both? Meh. It’s not something to stand in the way of using the platform at all but it is a bit annoying.
Anyway, my one “complaint” is just that the niche communities I’m a member of on Reddit don’t exist here. Specifically, communities for buying and trading things like r/photomarket.
This is still a relatively new platform. It’s going to take some time for it to build itself organically. It feels to me that a measurable amount of content on the platform is critiquing the platform. I think it would be more conducive if we all spent less time critiquing and more time generating original content - not stuff cross-posted from other platforms. I mean, in general, if you’re searching the web for “a thing”, the results aren’t going to direct you to the fediverse unless you’re specifically searching about something regarding the fediverse. Showing up in search results might be the tipping point that drives more users to join the platform.
Wow. All the top comments are about finding / joining / onboarding.
Then it’s a solid complaint. A quick story as to why you don’t understand it: I use to do tech support and I’d hear so many coworkers get super frustrated about how stupid the people calling in were, because they couldn’t even do…whatever the thing was. I would make a point to the new hires that they knew how to do this stuff because they’re techies, because this is what they grew up learning. The doctor or lawyer or professor on the other end of the call is not stupid whatsoever…in fact, they’re likely much smarter than the person calling them stupid, they just took a different path. The techie is unable to fathom that the depth of their own technical knowledge is not common knowledge whatsoever and takes the basics for granted. At its core is an inability to see one’s self as more than a standard deviation from the norm. Cheers.
I don’t like him either
It seems like people just want to be told what to do.
Yes exactly. Not many people like to figure out how something works, they just want it to work.
Apple’s success isn’t because it’s the best at any individual feature. It’s successful because All the features just work without having to figure anything out.
The same problem I have when it comes to Mastodon/Misskey/Firefish - I feel like everything is so fragmented, like I have to jump from one place to another. Thankfully, this applies significantly less in the “threadiverse” (Outdated name, we definitely need a new one) because there aren’t 6 different platforms and tens of different forks, and Lemmy and Kbin are pretty much 100% compatible with one another, unlike those moments where you can’t see Mastodon re-toots on Firefish a lot of the time or sometimes accounts’ posts appear much later in a different instance. We don’t need to worry about that here.
On one hand, I kind of like that there are separate communities to check up on. It’s a very efficient way to waste time.
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There are cases where reposts on some Mastodon instances and most of Misskey’s reposts aren’t seen on Firefish, but are seen on Misskey, because for some reason Misskey seems to have better protocol interoperability, so you get a vastly different experience even when following the same people.
Loads more unnecessary and weird political comments on completely unrelated posts. On Reddit it depended much more on the subreddit whether you’ll get those weird comments, on Lemmy I found lots of comments up high on various non-political communities which just repeat certain political combat slogans on many posts.
Even when I sympathize with ‘that side’ moreso than the opposite one, it’s just dumb and annoying to me.
Multiple communities with the same theme in diverse servers mean lots of repeated information in my home page.
I find hard to find new niche communities. All is all, the common denominator. My home is what I already have subscribed. Local instance communities are there. But I don know a good way to get offended content from communities outside of those categories.
There’s a few different community browsers:
It’s still got the problem of being repetitive.
And there’s not a great way to suggest “you might like…” based on your current subscriptions.
IMO, moderators of communities need to merge their communities. Identify which community is bigger and quite frankly push users to just use that one, to reduce the ambiguity over which one to use. The software ideally would also have an officially supported way to just close your community and transfer everyone’s subscriptions to a different one, so that we don’t have these duplicates confusingly still showing up in the listings.
I personally did this. I tried to create and promote a community I thought I was the first to make. When I learned it actually already existed (and just… didn’t show up in search because of course not), I shuttered the one I made and pointed it at the other one.
What’s bizarre to me is that the Android community even did switch to a different one… and then switched back to having two?? It’s weird and I don’t understand why they did it.
It’s a solution, but I don’t like it.
1.- It’s less resilient. If (more like when) one server goes down it could take the only community in a topic with it. 2.- If the moderators for the community of your interest are kind of dickwads, or absent, or malicious, you have no alternative. 3.- Federation can create weird problems. If your account instance is not the community’s one, you could be effectively banned, without doing anything wrong. 4.- Creates a perverse incentive for using the biggest instance you can for both creating communities and users. Some of the bigger Lemmy instances already are under heavy load and having problems to stay online. Imagine if we discourage using small instances.
Some mechanisms to “merge” communities across servers would be cool addition. Every Android community in every server that still federates with each other lists every post in all of them. Moderators moderate the posts in their instance. Link repetition is the same as inside of one single community. If one of the composing communities moderator team doesn’t does it’s part it could be expelled from the composite. Like a soft de-federation.
Just rambling. It’s a complex problem.
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It’s a solution, but I don’t like it.
1.- It’s less resilient. If (more like when) one server goes down it could take the only community in a topic with it.
2.- If the moderators for the community of your interest are kind of dickwads, or absent, or malicious, you have no alternative.
3.- Federation can create weird problems. If your account instance is not the community’s one, you could be effectively banned, without doing anything wrong.
4.- Creates a perverse incentive for using the biggest instance you can for both creating communities and users. Some of the bigger Lemmy instances already are under heavy load and having problems to stay online. Imagine if we discourage using small instances.
Some mechanisms to “merge” communities across servers would be cool addition. Every Android community in every server that still federates with each other lists every post in all of them. Moderators moderate the posts in their instance. Link repetition is the same as inside of one single community. If one of the composing communities moderator team doesn’t does it’s part it could be expelled from the composite. Like a soft de-federation.
Just rambling. It’s a complex problem.
- We already have a solution for this with tcp/ip with resiliency in the communication chain. Make the communities duplicated across servers and any server has a copy of the community.
- This is definitely an issue but maybe a mod would only be able to control via voting with other mods for that community across servers? Make it more democratic than autocratic? Mod actions should be public too. No working in the shadows allowed.
- You see this in gaming. People looking for interaction all swarm to the busy servers and you’ll see dozens of servers all barely in use. Maybe your login should be load balanced and redirected to low use servers.
Agree it isn’t simple. “We want control without control”
1.- That would make Lemmy servers ultra unsafe to host. Server owners would not be able to moderate content hosted in their machine. It would make a good distributed solution, but not a federated one.
Maybe we’d prefer a centralized organization, with distributed resources. But seeing the defederation drama every week, it doesn’t look the path anyone wants to follow.
- I feel like this one is an issue either way. Even if it doesn’t take out the entire community, taking out the largest community is pretty impactful. It worries me that the fediverse feels so fragile.
- I think that case is a perfectly valid one to create a new community over. I’m not saying there should never be duplicates, just that we shouldn’t have them without a reason.
- Yeaaaah, I think defederation should be handled better and admins need more granular options so that they don’t have to defederate except in the most extreme cases. The fact that some of the biggest instances can’t be seen by some other instances (or at least one other) is weird and worrisome.
- I don’t think this would be a reason to avoid smaller instances, but admittedly people will generally create communities on their instance. I don’t think you even can create a community on another instance? You have to have someone on that instance create it and set you as a mod.
I don’t have anywhere to discuss reality TV bullshit now :( Reddit was good for that. I just want to know if Charity sent the right guy home tonight and I haven’t found a community for that yet.
100%
It’s difficult to figure out what to do when copies of your particular niche community exist in 5 different places, all with very similar subscriber counts.
I would hope in the future we get a more fleshed out version of multireddits. I think it would be a decent solution since I don’t think duplication of communities is a phenomenon that will ever go away.
