- 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
Onboarding is unclear for people. So if they just Google Lemmy it’s a bit of a adventure for them to figure out they have to make an account where to make the account.
The friction around account creation is difficult. Many let me instances require manual approval, so that slows down me onboarding funnel.
Let’s be Frank most people don’t want to make an account, entering email and password and validation. Using some federated identity like Google Apple would make The onboarding easier for people
Discovery is very difficult, especially if you’re on a smaller instance, you have to know what communities to individually subscribe to. There’s some mitigations with find a Lemmy community websites but they’re not built into most of the apps yet. So unless you’re joining a very large server, Lemmy’s going to feel pretty empty.
There’s some gaps between Lemmy and other platforms around media rich posts, especially videos and GIFs. Posting a video on Lemmy is difficult especially if you’re on a mobile device.
I still love Lemmy, these are just observations with respect to your query
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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
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
Even finding Lemmy was not easy. Just doing a search brought up Lemmy from Motörhead. Talented guy, but not really what I wanted. It took me awhile before I even found an instance, and that was only because of a YT video. Most folks will just use the first page of their chosen search engine, and then give up.
Then signing up to… pretty much anything federated is a confusing experience for new users. Trying to wrap your head around instances, communities, and so on. “Why does there have to be an XYZ community at Example instance, when there already is one on ABC Instance? Can’t they just merge? What’s the point? What if I want to be a part of example instance, but want to subscribe to communities on the ABC instance?“
When signup is done, but you then enabled 2FA. You input the string on your app, click apply. Then when you try to log back in, you find you’re logged out, and don’t know why. It’s because Lemmy is one of the few services to use SHA256, and not SHA1. So it doesn’t work with something like Bitwarden. I had to find a GitHub post to find out why this was happening. Not a good first impression.
Then when you subscribe to communities they’re either lacking in content, or reposting, sometimes from another instance.
There seems to be issues with posting media, and the whole integration with other ActivityPub seems to need some work.
Overall I think all this is growing pains. I wouldn’t say the service is ready, but I don’t think it’ll be ready, until it onboards new users. However I don’t think many new users (non-technical users especially) will stay, due to the issues above.
I’m still struggling with it. I clicked on a post that looked interesting and it took me to a server I didn’t have a logon to. I wanted to leave a comment but I couldn’t. Was I banned? Nope, I finally realized I’d been directed to a different server. Now imagine someone with zero IT background trying to deal with this. They’d probably just quit it.
It is interesting to be on the ground floor of something new though.
