From 2,997 active users across all lemmy instances at the beginning of June, the number increased to 52,797 by June 30th. Source.
An active user on Lemmy is "someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.” Source. That means lurkers are not counted as active users.
We’re really building something here!
Registration and discovery needs to be simplified tremendously for long term viability. But it’s a good start.
I keep seeing this said about lemmy but kbin was identical to any other site. So I looked up what the process is for lemmy and, aside from like 2 glitches to look out for it was exactly the same.
Please tell me what is difficult.
My issue was I didn’t know where to go to sign up. It took me a little time to understand the fediverse, then I had to figure out what instance I should sign up for. After that I started hearing some instances weren’t accepting new accounts but didn’t know if that was a thing everywhere or only one instance. I consider myself above average compared to the general public when it comes to my capabilities with the Internet and computer tech in general, it’s never taken me days to understand stand how to sign up for a website like this before.
It does seem simple now that I’m here and understand things better. It’s just a learning curve; this is unique to any website\forum\whatever I’ve played with before.
You have to consider that your technical proficiency is not the same as everyone else’s.
I think you’re right insofar as onboarding is concerned. Once you’ve registered, though, Lemmy is relatively straightforward to use. Changing your user settings to display posts from ALL federated Lemmy instances on your front page helps with discoverability. That should be the default setting, but it isn’t. That setting is associated with the “Type” parameter (found just below “Theme”). It isn’t terribly obvious.
And sadly, the software seems to be little better than proof of concept quality. It seems poorly architected for functionality, usability and scalability.
UX is on par or better than reddit back when I joined. Mobile apps are certainly better.
Similar experience to reddit and apps, albeit slightly clunky.
Don’t get me wrong - I think it is a good start, but there are some significant concerns:
- My biggest UX complaint is that the method for connecting to a federated community is just…wrong. Do something completely unintuitive (paste a glyph / URL in search), get an error (not found), wait a while and hopefully it will start working. I can’t fathom who thought this was a good idea, and I’m shocked that apparently Mastadon does it the same way. We’re losing a lot of interested users at this step.
- UX issue #2 - which may be fixed in .8, can’t say - is that there is basically no error handling. Any server error or user error results in the spinning wheel of death. Sometimes refreshing fixes it, sometimes it doesn’t. For example, did you know there is a 10k post limit? If your post exceeds 10k - you guessed it - spinning wheel of death. Try to sign up with a user ID that’s already taken? Spinning wheel of death. Log in without verifying your e-mail? Spinning wheel of death. You get the idea.
- I’m not an admin, but apparently that the software isn’t really designed for cluster scaling. I think the assumption is that more instances solve scaling. It doesn’t.
- Functionality wise, there is very little control for mods. Pin, delete, ban. Edit the sidebar. That’s it.
These are problems that can be solved, but the next step will be to see where development leadership steers the platform. It is how these problems are solved that will decide whether Lemmy or Kbin becomes the leading platform.
I disagree. At first I was frustrated that people were having so much difficulty with such a simple process, but after a while I adopted the mindset that if they’re too stupid to figure out something so mundane then I don’t want them here anyway. 🤷♂️
Yeah. I don’t want just tech savvy people here. I want people with non-tech hobbies like gardening and home improvement to join too.
I keep seeing people say this but honestly registering is really easy. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to create an account after leaving reddit
Well, sure, anyone posting here at the moment figured it out. But I’d bet there’s tons of people interested but intimidated.
You literally click the sign up button, fill out the form, get an email saying your application was accepted and then log in. What is complicated about that?
Genuine question.
From the outside looking in, the whole model seemed needlessly complicated. So it’s like there’s a LOT of reddit.coms over here? But they’re all the same? But also different? What’s the difference? Which one do I sign up on?
But then I get here and realized it doesn’t really matter that much, since you can more or less use all of them regardless of which one you sign up for.
Something about the way users try to communicate what Lemmy/Fediverse IS, is the complicated part. It’s like everyone wants to jump straight to the more technical details behind how the model works; which probably scares off a lot of the people who just want a place to pop in and talk about their hobbies.
Yeah, this scared me off for weeks because I didn’t want the hassle. Turns out it’s way easier than those dorks were making it seem!
Exactly. People last week were adamant about needing to spread out new users across different instances. But let’s be honest, casual newcomers don’t really pay much attention to that. They just want to see a website a lot of content before signing up. The federation concept should be introduced a bit later after they’re comfortable.
yeah the people running this show need to understand that normies dont care about server hosting. they just want a feed with cat pics
Yeah, there should be simple “how and where do I sign up and find my favourite communities”. I feel like there is lots of tech talk here because lots of tech stuff needs to happen before these sites are ready for the full moderation suit and for supporting the most basic aspects of Reddit communities (like flairs)…
I just told my fairly tech-unsavvy partner the email analogy:
You sign up on Google, I sign up on yahoo, my bro-in-law runs his own from a server in his house. We can all email each other and the email looks mostly the same no matter who reads it, but yahoo isn’t Google isn’t my bro-in-law. Lemmy = email in general, yahoo = lemmy.ml, Google = lemmy.world, etc.
She immediately got it and has an account on some instance and has subscribed to a bunch of places.
Yep, it’s email but with a nice interface and open ‘threads’ which we can post on.
Agreed. I feel like the apps in development are trying to make the signup process a bit easier though, so we’ll see how that goes.
I’m currently using the beta for Memmy on iOS. I think it’s prepping for an App Store release today. It’s a good foundation and has promise.
Most of the devs that worked on 3rd party reddit apps are remodeling to support lemmy. So we are about to get some really good quality apps in the next 4 to 6 weeks.
