2d ago

Be the change you want to see in Lemmy

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.

99 comments

Hey if an old guy like me can figure it out its not hard .
- They are entitled and don't want to expend effort

FWIW, I think the design and layout of lemmy is superb. Way better than reddit, old and new.
You guys made a lot of good decisions.

"Which server do I join?" seems to be a sticking point for a lot of people.
The "Browse servers" page does say at the top "You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn't matter which one you choose", but on showing this page you immediately scroll that message off the screen. Maybe if you kept that bit visible it would help.
Also I think comparing it with email servers might be helpful. People already know they can email anyone from any email server, and that signing up to, say, Posteo, doesn't mean you can only email other Posteo users.
- it doesn't matter which one you choose
  That's not really true though, every instance has it's own rules, and it's own federation policies, not to mention the other instances that don't federate with it.
  I'm already on lemmy, so it's not like I haven't gone through this before, yet I still haven't made a pixelfed account despite being interested because I don't want to just go for the biggest instance and I have no idea how to vet the other ones.
  
  I think it's better to keep it simple for new users. Tell them it doesn't matter which server since that is theoretically true in a general sense. No need to overwhelm them with all the asterisks. Once they start engaging, they'll learn the nuances and can change instances.

I honestly think most people will figure it out. I did. :)

Can start with people not directing anyone to the .ml, or .ml like instances for starters. Maybe even sticky that the top.

- We haven't banned anyone for trying to contribute. If you're talking about bans from lemmy.ml, that doesn't prevent anyone from contributing on Github. Besides, the whole purpose of Lemmy is that there can be different instances with different moderation policies.

The great thing about Lemmy is that it is an open source project and you can tweak the UI yourself if you have a bit of HTML and CSS knowledge. Do not be put off by fancy words like Bootstrap, Inferno, Tailwind, many are just HTML, CSS, or Javascript under the hood.
If anyone on here is looking for a more a more accessible Lemmy theme, I helped make one recently for the instance RBlind: RBlind Lemmy Themes (Codeberg repo). I made detailed documentation as well which could be helpful for theme developers or for those interested in helping improve Lemmy's accessibility.
Since making the theme, I've been making some pull requests (PRs) with lemmy-ui and lemmy-docs to try improve the UI and docs based on some of the things I saw while developing the theme. I hadn't done anything involving PRs before but the Lemmy team dessalines and nutomic and other contributors have been very receptive so far and offering helpful suggestions. The changes are small but every bit counts, and when they trickle down to all users I am hoping it'll be a positive change for many users.

Easier
If choosing a server and signing up is too "hard" for someone, then I'd rather they stay on Reddit.
Can Lemmy benefit from your suggestions, definitely. But the easy vs hard structure to these types of conversations feel a lot like the shopping cart dilemma.

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!
- Oh, I can do project management too!
  Your next task is waves hands around ... the thing ... waves hands around some more ... like the other thing ... but different.
- I got you guys, lets start with daily standup to get everyone on the same page.
- 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.
  
  Honestly, if my PM never pestered me about the status of my tickets, I would never close them. Some of us need the pestering!
  
  Also, why haven't you closed that low priority ticket and you keep working the high priority tickets that are new.

I'm doing my small part.
Went from 100% lurker on Reddit to regularly active lemmy commenter
- It's so much easier to comment and get replies here.
- Same. I still occasionally browse Reddit, but I have a rule that I don't post or comment there. I do post and comment here.
  
  Same, I only lurk to see what's popping but dont comment here.
  
  Don’t forget to adblock them so you’re draining the resources, minutely and slowly, but draining nonetheless.

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!

I'm the OP of one of the posts that blew up about UX.
This is great news, I will look into building something like join-lemmy/onboarding that could guide users, or improving join-lemmy
- Its best if you improve the existing site, that way you dont have to worry about hosting, or directing users to your new site.
- Nice !

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
- You and you being so nice made me switch to ad hominem faster than usual! How the person like you can be so terribly pleasant? Treat yourself, you fellow lemming.

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.
- Here’s another for your list:
  Use a VPN? Blocked from accessing it. (I try to get info from internet searches sometimes and they block me, I have to use a VPN because am in China.)
  
  This is only if you aren't logged in. If you login to reddit you can use a VPN fine. It is still so incredibly annoying though.
- This post is about UI and onboarding tho, not about mod behaviour.
- Yeah new users are like, semi-shadow banned for a while

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.

Good post
Also, !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com for people who want to help promoting Lemmy Mbin Piefed

I can confirm. These guys are very open to pull requests that improve the platform.

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?

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.
Wholeheartedly agree with this. Also people should get use to taking responsibility for their online experiences. Corporations have made people stupid to the point they reject autonomy.

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!

My proposal have been a little more complicated, but IMO works well for a BFU:
create some set of rules for "default instances" - every instance that wants to be in the list must follow them and will be periodically checked
I don't have any particular rules in mind, but some examples might include active moderation team, obviously registrations being open and if you really want to make it easy, either no application question or having it automatically approved by an automod of some kind
on join-lemmy, present a registration form that will create an account on a randomly selected instance from the pool and redirect there afterwards
there should be a link somewhere for "experts" where you could link to the current wizard
I'm willing to work on this if we can sit down and agree on the criteria for the pool. I can also ask my UX guy to help a little.
Feel free to text me here or on Matrix if this is something you think is worth pursuing. I'd also appreciate if you let me know it's not the direction you want to go in.
- I would call them "starter" instances. And I'm in agreement there should be a set of principles that these instances should follow but at the same time telling new users that it's okay to switch instances. I started in .world but moved due to their increasingly conservative changes.
  While I personally would steer new users away from .world, I think it's more important to tell them it's okay to switch instances.
- create some set of rules for “default instances” - every instance that wants to be in the list must follow them and will be periodically checked
  
  I don’t have any particular rules in mind, but some examples might include active moderation team, obviously registrations being open and if you really want to make it easy, either no application question or having it automatically approved by an automod of some kind
  The Mastodon Server Covenant is pretty much what you describe here, and could be used as a starting point: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
- I don’t have any particular rules in mind, but some examples might include active moderation team, obviously registrations being open and if you really want to make it easy, either no application question or having it automatically approved by an automod of some kind
  Hexbear meets those requirements, which rule would you add to exclude them? Back in the day, exploding heads would fit them too
  
  maybe they should need to maintain a certain percentage of high pop instances that federate with them. Basically establishing a standard of trust.
  "At least 80% of instances with over 1,000 active users must federate with you to be a Lemmy starter instance."
  This guarantees that new users will see the majority of content, and the starter instances won't be embroiled in federation wars. The % value and pop numbers can change to reduce it down to a manageable number of starter instances.
  
  That was just rules to make it work on the technical side - you're not helping the user experience if you have to wait half a day until someone manually approves your registration.
  The rest would need to be discussed and actually thought out (and agreed upon with Lemmy devs, who own the join-lemmy domain).
  I haven't given it much thought because I see no point if it never gets implemented.
  
  Cooking up global fediverse rules specifically meant to try and exclude an instance is crossing the line imo. If you don't like interacting with them, join one of the many instances that have already blocked them.
  This kind of crusade goes against the spirit of the fediverse imo.
- I like this!
- Here's my idea for rules as well as the ones u came up with: No illegal shit No extremist ideology No hexbear or ml cos they will claim they are being unfairly censored and the irony of that is pretty funny.

I don't think that Reddit is so much better. The interface at the moment is full of ads that make i confusing. The only thing is the community search that is a bit cumbersome, but this is due to federation, and understood. On the other hand the federation with Mastodon/Friendica/whatever is super-powerful, hand honestly enjoyable
Thank you for all your work
- The only thing good about Reddit is that is where everyone is. Full stop.
- The only thing is the community search that is a bit cumbersome, but this is due to federation, and understood.
  This would help https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951

Let's all be clear, Reddit is part of the surveillance state.
You can't log in without Google and Apple trackers being allowed. New Reddit has recapcha trackers on every page. Only old.reddit doesn't track what you see, just what you write.
Your thoughts and content belong to a publicly traded company focused on profits if you use reddit.

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.

There'd probably arise a need of a default instance with only guest access for a test drive before they pick their own instance, with some pop ups pointing at the fact that the name nutomic@lemmy.ml means he is a part of some meta-subreddit lemmy.ml, that doesn't mean shit for he just helped andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works with a link to the source. Their likes are collected but never shown. When they'd want to stop lurking and finally press a login button, it shall instead invite them to see instances of people they liked before first, others next, with tips what lead some rank so high in their list. After the signup is confirmed, their likes may or may not be transported, but their temporal profile is deleted.
I see the natural flow would be something akin to that: we start with a showcase of general content from different nearly-default instances and then get them recs about persons they did enjoy reading.

I do my part! (Throw a couple of PRS the devs way then go back to my goblin hole)

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.

Is there an easy way to add tags (language and interests) to servers? I excepted one instance to come up with a certain combination, but there were none at all
- I dont think its a good idea to give money to Google or Bing for advertising. It would make Lemmy appear like a commercial project and give false expectations. And we barely have enough money for development so in my opinion money its better to donate. However if you have money and want to spend it on advertising, nothing is stopping you from doing that.
  
  Word of mouth is probably a better idea
- Instance topics are defined here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/blob/main/src/shared/components/instances-definitions.ts#L103

I dont know. Not sure what can be improved, because that site keeps sending the majority of users to the large instances. Its against everything the fediverse was supposed to be. Decentralized. Not 5 instances having all users.
But whatever. Im happy on my smaller instance. :)
- Are you referring to join-lemmy.org? It has a randomized order for the instances, so usually smaller ones are near the top.
  
  I guess I need to check it out again. If that is true, its amazing.

If you see anything...that could be improved, the best option is to make that improvement yourself.
Are you under the impression that just everyone is a web developer?
Besides it would be impossible to reach an agreement who this default instance should federate with or how exactly it should be moderated.
If I may make a proposition: You can look at how Pixelfed allows certain instances that meet certain standards to opt into being listed in the app for discovery, all electronically. My recommendation would be to have 2 choices for users on sign-up:
A random choice from the list of approved instances, that's rotated periodically to prevent any particular instance from being inundated with new signups
"Choose a different instance" where users can enter their preferred one manually.
People can't seem to make up their minds if it matters which instance you join. I really don't think it does.
- Are you under the impression that just everyone is a web developer?
  The Lemmy documentation is just text
  
  Nobody is talking about updating the documentation.

99 comments