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  • To the guy in here going "UX != UI!!!" Sure, but you can't design UX, especially for the unwashed masses. "Tried cutting toenails with lawnmower; severed foot. 0/10 bad user experience."

    Lemmy has a "have our cake and eat it too" problem. It offers two mutually exclusive promises:

    • Each instance is its own independent self-contained little Reddit with their own communities, culture, code of conduct etc. so that individuals can find a place that suits them or make one if none is available, and
    • All the servers are part of one great big federated system where all users have access to content on all instances so it doesn't matter which instance you sign up for, you can access it all.

    In practice, the former is more or less true, the latter really isn't.

    First there's the obvious topic of defederation, which makes the "join one server, access all of them" an outright lie. On the one hand, I think everyone here will agree this platform requires defederation to function so that we can kick out instances like lolli.rape or whatever, which thank you admins and mods for dealing with. But what about Hexbear, or Truth Social (which as I understand it is running on Mastodon software). The only honest answer to "where do we draw that line?" is "somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there."

    It is intellectually dishonest to say that Lemmy has this problem and Reddit doesn't. Post in r/mensrights and an automod bans you from r/twoxchromosomes. Do basically anything anywhere on the platform and get banned from r/conservative. They managed to implement "It's a different platform depending on who you are" on a monolithic service.

    All that crap aside, the average user has a more limited perspective on the rest of the fediverse than his home instance. Often, the UI defaults to viewing only local posts, you have to tell it to give you a global feed. You can browse a list of your local communities, you can browse a list of global communities, you can't browse a list of communities on a given foreign instance. 'Show me everything on lemmy.sports' or indeed 'show me a list of communities on lemmy.nsfw.' You cannot create (or moderate?) communities on instances you aren't a member of. It is, if only slightly, easier to participate on your home instance than elsewhere.

    Either your choice of server does matter, or it doesn't.

    If it does matter, we shouldn't have so many general purpose instances, it should be lemmy.music and lemmy.art and lemmy.uk. Then newcomers are presented a meaningful choice. Are you mostly interested in discussions pertaining to your country? Your hobby? Your career? Sign up here to mostly participate in that, and no matter which you pick you can visit the rest of the Lemmyverse, too."

    If it doesn't matter, then design it such that instances are entirely transparent to users; eliminate the possibility of !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@lemmy.ml coexisting, and make all instances lemmy1.world lemmy2.world, issue credentials centrally and then just spread the load in the background.

    I don't think you can have both at the same time.

  • The main reason why I still prefer Reddit, is content. Even though I am subscribed to similar subs/communities/magazines/whatever on Reddit/Lemmy, my Reddit home screen is filled with interesting content compared to Lemmy. And, I never had to ban/hide anything/anyone on Reddit.

  • Well, when I started to use lemmy I had a few problems:

    1. I read something on the landing page about "Mastodon account works too" so tried that, so basically confused fediverse, activitypub, mastodon and lemmy and wondered why nothing worked. Oops.
    2. I tried to join a community that was meant to migrate away from reddit, but found two duplicates. So I wasn't sure which one was the correct one. Ultimately the migration failed, even though it was a software oriented community
    3. Then I soon wanted to make a new account on a server that doesn't require an email. Because emails today are basically personally identifiable for security agencies.
    4. Then I found out that socialists are called tankies on lemmy and some of the main socialist instances are banned by the limbrols. So I made a new account and posted a little and had an interesting discussion about voting in proto-fascist democracies and promptly got banned by the tankies. Oh well.
    5. Then I had a discussion about how calling russian people "orcs" is racist. You guessed it, banned.
    6. Well several accounts later, here I am, the last sane man on the internet and you all fucking suck hahaha

    I do think lemmy is worthwhile and can be fun, but as a reddit alternative it has already failed. You cannot purge insanity by splitting it up into smaller insanlets. That's just schizophrenia.

  • Bad UX isn't keeping most people away from Lemmy. Not being able to give up their addiction to Reddit is what's keeping them from Lemmy. There's a lot of people who will complain about the shitty things billionaires and tech companies and politicians do to them, but aren't willing to lift a finger to change things.

    You're never going to bring those people to Lemmy unless Reddit shuts down and you develop an algorithm to spoon feed them whatever they want to feed their doomscrolling habit. Lemmy is better off without them.

  • For the majority of commenters: UX is not UI.

    The poor UX experience is the research a person has to do before they can even participate. You need to have a basic understanding of how the network works, and then you have to shop around for a server.

    It’s enough friction to prevent people from on-boarding and that’s not good for a platform that needs people to be valuable.

  • imo this friction will erode as larger instances come into play; people will join a large, main instance without even knowing of the others, and-- if they have a problem with the instance they joined-- they'll find they can easily jump ship there.

  • Oh so we badmouthing & smearing the Fediverse huh.

    Ok let's ask them what counts as a "Good UI/UX" & "Endless wars" ? Really ?

  • Those comments are fairly meaningless. Federation wars? Where? There was some controversy like a year ago from why I recall and everyone has moved way on. I wouldn’t even consider that UX either.

  • People forget that user experience isn't just the stuff on the screen you interact with. There is a governance piece that is lacking in a lot of instances, and in the open source community as a whole. A lot of the successful projects out there are backed by some kind of foundation.

    Take a look at the latest Hexbear drama. Some person out there owned the domain for their instance and let it expire. Now they are in a bidding war with a crypto site with a hexagon-related name. If they had formed some kind of organization or entity that registered the domain and owned the instance, this probably wouldn't have happened. Their users wouldn't get redirected to a domain auction site when trying to access the site. That's not an ideal user experience. It destroys trust.

    SDF being a 501c(7) is one of the reasons that it's my home instance. For me, it provides a level of trust that an instance run by some random person on the internet doesn't. If there is a big federation/defederation debate, then it's really up to the membership to decide, and not a collection of admins or a single person getting the vibe of the users.

    Another thing to remember is that Lemmy really shouldn't be competing against Reddit. The purpose of Reddit is to have the user generate content in order to keep the user's attention on the site so they can sell targeted advertisements. This is the basic business model for all of commercial social media. It has nothing to do with creating communities. That is secondary. If you want more people on Lemmy so that there is more content for you to consume, just stay on Reddit or TikTok. They need to sell ads in order to fund model training to keep your engagement up in order to sell more ads in order to provide quarterly growth to their shareholders. If you want more people on Lemmy because more brains mean better communities, then focus the communities.

    The real opportunity for the fediverse is getting a lot of the existing non-profits, social organizations, and other types of communities to set up their own instances. This answers the “what instance do I join?” question by joining the instance associated with the community you're already involved in. Another reason I'm on SDF is retro computing. If you're really into your local makerspace, then you probably have a community ready to go for a Lemmy instance. If you're involved in your HOA and you all have a Facebook page or are all over Nextdoor, maybe set up a Lemmy instance. In all these cases, the organizational infrastructure is there for the administrative stuff like getting a domain and paying for hosting.

    Also, I'm old enough to remember that Facebook took off when everyone's parents started joining. Imagine if the AARP rolled out a Lemmy instance. They are big enough put some serious money into development. You would probably get a lot of accessibility improvements.

    P.S.

    Check out how theATL.social is organized. The guy did as a LLC, but he seems to be community focused and transparent.

    https://yall.theatl.social/post/201135

    https://opencollective.com/theatlsocial

    https://yall.theatl.social/communities

  • There was a lot of debate about this when the reddit exodus happened in 2023. I initially joined then and have stuck around since. Something that was said a lot back then that I agree with is that Lemmy doesn't have to compete with reddit. It's alright for this corner of the internet to exist and not be the single dominant one.

    If someone makes a reddit clone somewhere else with more liberal admins, good for them. I wouldn't be going there. The fact that Lemmy is sectioned into servers is part of the appeal. I'm glad that I can be part of a server with very progressive administration. I would never get this level of moderation and support from any other social media. I'm fine with that meaning that uninformed people who just want to doom-scroll are less likely to come here.

    We have seen growth periods time and again when problems arise with private social media companies. Each time, a little more people from the initial wave join for good. I think that's fine. Most lemmy servers are run for free by people who just believe in what we're doing here. We can always add more servers, but we can't handle the kind of traffic that reddit handles. We're entirely dependent on dedicated people investing large amounts of their time to create and maintain these spaces for us.

  • Has software usage really gotten to the point where the average person can't handle being given a choice about anything? Where it's just too much effort to do anything more than mindlessly click on whatever is presented to them? 🤦

  • It's shocking to me just how stupid the average person is today. Computing catering to the lowest common denominator has made it too easy for idiots. Make computing difficult again; make people actually have to learn something. A tall order for the idiocracy of 2025.

    1. Stop making blanket claims about instances you like or dislike, no matter how fair you feel they may be, and don't fall for the bait of others doing it. This is just drama and is exhausting to read about.
    2. Instead of suggesting people "join Lemmy", say things like "Join Lemmy at programming.dev" (or whatever instance you yourself are using). Sure, "but picking a server is hard" will always probably be a complaint, but leading with the one you personally use is the best way around it. If you're on a hobby focused instance (like I am) then maybe suggest a generic instance to people outside of your hobby. Don't be afraid to suggest lemmy.world. It's better to suggest the biggest instance than endlessly debate about which one is the best to suggest.
885 comments