I told somebody I know who knew about Reddit’s API changes about Lemmy. He has a master’s degree in Computer Science and works as a software engineer. But then, he told me that it’s too confusing to get into, even for someone like him. This is great feedback and I hope that these issues will be fixed in the coming months.
It took me five minutes to find an instance and sign in. I figured out (mostly) how instances work over the course of a couple of days. I dont have a degree. Sounds like youre friend just doesnt want to give it a shot
Agreed. I struggle with new things and have had some frustrations figuring out Lemmy, but like… It’s really not that hard. And I’m not young and hip anymore, nor have I ever been very tech savvy. But I figured it out.
Dude just has a lack of give-a-damn.
I have a master’s degrees, but I doubt that matters. My experience mirrors yours: five minutes (except for waiting times to get approved). I agree with your conclusion.
I tried signing up under multiple instances and they never went through. Finally got one though and it’s pretty easy for the most part. I do think the linking needs to work better as general kinks being you directly to that instance vs. viewing it from your own this requiring you to log in or go back to your insurance and try and find the post/community.
Just to get it out of the way: there are obviously some issues with lemmy discoverability and quantity of content
But to be blunt: this is not the kind of user lemmy needs right now, he won’t be missed. He doesn’t want to join a community, he wants to scroll a feed that is pre-curated for him. And to be honest, that is most redditors, for better or for worse, but the core of the site, what gives it most of its value besides just scale, is powerusers and mods who will see: “oh there isn’t a formula1 comm yet? I’ll make one”. Boom. Problem solved. among a userbase of thousands there will be other people who want to talk about F1, but you need at least one person to be engaged enough to create the community and post to it once in a while.
This perspective is fundamentally self-defeating if you want to get an alternative off the ground. It will take off if people get into it, and it won’t if they don’t
Yeah, this site is in early stages and if someone just wants to be babysat… we literally don’t have the manpower for that yet! A smaller dedicated userbase is more important at this stage than mindless growth.
The fediverse is not suited at the moment to fixed mindset types.
Personally, I find that refreshing. It reminds me of my earliest interactions with the Internet on BBS. The web for a long while has felt very consumerist; first curated spaces becoming walled gardens and then the subtle shift from web services as products to our attention & data as the Internet’s main product. We lost the magical sense of exploration and experimentation that made the early Internet so special. The fediverse is the first instance (pun half-intended) I’ve come across that speaks to that spirit.
I think your friend just doesn’t want to put in 5 minutes of effort. And honestly, that’s fine. I think the average reddittor has been kind of trending that way for a while, and I wish him the best of luck hanging out with people who can’t be assed to put in 5 minutes to figure anything out. I might be wrong, but especially for technical content I think the mean will drop much further on reddit.
It’s maybe 5 minutes of effort to create an account, but it’s another 5 minutes of effort to log in, and then 15+ minutes of effort to find your favorite communities. I’m willing to take that effort, but this shows how Lemmy could improve.
I mean it took me years to find different community’s on reddit.
Subscribing to communities is kind of a pain in the ass if you aren’t looking for anything specifically. I went page by page, because I have a problem - but damn, can we get some sort of sorting, at least alphabetically? I’m sure I missed some communities because there’d be some shifting/refreshing between me subbing to something and then moving on to the next page. I’d also love for a tick box that you could toggle “don’t show subscribed” when browsing to make finding newer communities and instances easier. Locally, it’s much more manageable, but once you go over to All…
Or it shows that if poeple want a Reddit clone to look elsewhere.
Does Lemmy even want to be a Reddit clone?
I do agree that the average Redditor will not only not switch, but will probably continue to use Reddit, at least until the 30th. We’ll see what happens after that. That being said, I think that’s a good thing. Reddit has 500m MAU. Not sure the fediverse is up to the task just yet.
In the meantime, Lemmy as a platform can benefit from this by fostering a solid community from the refugees that do make their way over. I imagine there’s a fair few software engineers who may now be interested in working on this project, which I think will be healthy for things in the long term.
I cant even imagine that Lemmy could handle one million users. But there will probably be ways in the future, after all Mastodon managed it somehow.
I agree it’s not user friendly (at least not as userfriendly as centralized platforms are) but I’m sorry I really doubt he has master’s in CS and if he does he bullshitted his way through to get it
Or he doesn’t want to take his work home. I grew up fixing / upgrading computers for hardware engineers at IBM when I was a kid. My dad was a programmer for the federal government and when he got home he didn’t want to touch technology (he was probably the last person to get a cell phone and the closest thing to a computer he uses today is an iPad).
As I get older I’m finding the same thing. I use linux at home but when gentoo died I didn’t switch to arch I went to ubuntu. I kept saying the iphone 4 - 6 - X were going to be my last iPhone before switching to android but I still haven’t. Sometimes you want stuff to just work. I don’t want to debug why the social media platform doesn’t let me login? I want to quickly catch-up on what’s happening and relax.
Yet here we are, both chatting on this social media and I don’t believe either of us had to dig in and debug lemmy to get here
I did. I had to find an instance that let me create an account without an approval process or a spinning wheel of nothings happening. Today is my first day posting on the platform but it’s my second trying to use it. I definitely had to search for answers to get this far and I’m not recommending it at all to my less techy friends until things stabilize.
That’s funny because I don’t have a masters degree in computer science and this wasn’t that fucking hard.
Your friend asks what “the product” is, which screams a fundamental misunderstanding of the service and Free Open Source Software in general.
He complains about the front page post about the servers. It’s very possible your friend knows how to program, but knows nothing about networking and systems administration, which, surprise, are actually entirely different things while being technically connected at the hip.
These things show a misunderstanding from the get-go, and an unwillingness to view it through any lens other than a business “what is the product, how will it make money” lens. The entire reason individual instances are slow is because they don’t have millions of servers in the backend. These are small-time developers doing the best they can with the tools they have available, which isn’t much. The instances are being hammered by post-reddit traffic, and that’s slowing things down considerably. Anyone from the “old” internet realizes this is a reality of having a website. I remember the days when sites would get “Slashdotted” and go down simply from traffic from readers from Slashdot. This is no different.
If your friend doesn’t want to join a community, that’s fine. He can stay in the Vulture Capital lane, that’s not our business.
It’s not so bad once you start using it. Signup was a nightmare on the app but besides that it’s been okay so far. I wish there were more people though.
Just because someone has a (PHD, masters, certificate, license, etc) doesn’t mean that they should have one. Ever take your car to a certified ASE mechanic or a board certified doctor and leave wondering WTF just happened? This anecdote means nothing.
Thanks! If lemmy wants to grow (and I do want that), it better listens to people who share their struggle.
It is irrelevant wether we find that struggle justified, wether we deem him worthy of joining, wether his assessment of the situation is correct. Even an ill informed rejection can help us improve.
Most users who face similar problems will just go away, never come back and not share anything to learn from. This person shares their point of view, and that’s a great resource to improve the user experience right from the welcome page.
This perspective is especially valuable, since once you managed to get through that process and familiarized yourself with the system, your view has changed. It can be hard to assume an uninformed perspective again. But we need to make lemmy accessible especially for this audience, because they are the only ones who can make it grow by joining.
So, what did we get?
- “The homepage is literally some bs about servers.”
- “Where are all the discussions happening?”
- “This federated stuff is all nice and cool technically but what’s the product?”
- He’s looking for “Discussions. Alternatives for subreddits.”
- “How do I search for Formula1 and Tennis?”
- “I created an account and it asks me to login again”
- “A link from search takes me to another server and asks me to login again”
- “If a human needs to explain how to use a platform […]”
We’ll come back to this later.
Let’s compare the experience on https://www.reddit.com/ and https://join-lemmy.org/ from the point of view of an unfamiliar user who might want to create an account.
On reddit, without being logged in:
- biggest part of the screen in the middle is occupied by actual posts
- user can scroll for more content and already gets a feeling how the regular experience might be within the first seconds, even before creating an account. Comment section is accessible, posts can even be shared without being logged in.
- top part of the feed is four exemplary posts which draw further attention to actual content
- left panel is categorized subs, which gives an impression what kind of content can be expected, and acts as a search function for those who cannot put into words what they are looking for
- right panel is almost the same, categorized subreddits. It’s hard to miss!
- top panel is a huge search box which can be used without leaving/changing the site
- bottom left and top right: Two big, bright orange buttons which start registration.
In short, reddit is filled with what most users come for, right from the start. It takes their wish so serious that there are many ways to check out the core content (center feed, four exemplary posts) or categories (left and right) or search (top, left, right).
This redundancy with slight variations can address different people who are used to different things. A person coming from an image-centered platform like instagram might go for the four exemplary posts which look like image thumbnails, while a person coming from a text-based forum will intuitively go for the center feed. Both ways directly lead to and familiarize with the core content without the need to log in.
The registration process is simple, the buttons are very visible and again redundant in opposing corners of the screen. Everything happens on one page which does not need to explain anything in text, because it is intuitively accessible.
On join-lemmy:
- biggest part of the screen is occupied by a rather technical explanation what lemmy is
- there is a hint of actual content in the background, but it is blurred out and inaccessible
- when I scroll to move the explanation away, I get more technial explanations which seems to address server admins, not users. A regular user might feel unwelcomed at this point. “Is this the right thing for me?”
- Two big buttons at the top: “Join a server” and “Run a server”.
- No way to see how content is displayed, how it feels to interact with content.
- No way to search for content or communities. Does lemmy even have what I am seeking?
- When clicking on “Join a Server”, a second lengthy, complicated page opens.
- The user is greeted with more explanation, including three links to more explanations.
- There is also a link to https://browse.feddit.de/. This is the first time users can check what content is available. It’s a bulky view with roughly 2.4 hits per page. The biggest link in each hit opens an explanation box. The smaller link actually leads to content. This is the fastest way for new users from the welcome page to an experience similar to when they simply open reddit.com.
- Now users have to decide and choose a server and click “Join”
- No registration mask, instead they are redirected to the instance’s main page.
- On this third page of their journey, users have to find the Login/Signup buttons again (which look like other buttons and are less visible than other buttons), and click one to start registration.
Let’s revisit what your friend said:
- “The homepage is literally some bs about servers.”
That is correct. Most of the information on https://join-lemmy.org/ seems to be geared towards people who are interested in running a server. This is not what people expect when they are looking for something like reddit as a user. This will most certainly scare some people away, or cause confusion.
Solution: Hide the tech talk. Address the regular crowd. People who want to run a server can manage to find it somewhere “hidden”. People who want to share cat pics cannot.
- “Where are all the discussions happening?”
He shares his interest, and expresses feeling helpless in finding it. Until they discover a specific link on page 2 (and invest a couple more clicks), users cannot see what’s going on inside lemmy, or wether there is even anything going on. Things which some newcomers honestly won’t know at this point.
Solution: Bring our star, the content, center stage. This is what people come for. Don’t make them search for it, we don’t have to hide it.
- “This federated stuff is all nice and cool technically but what’s the product?”
- He’s looking for “Discussions. Alternatives for subreddits.”
- “How do I search for Formula1 and Tennis?”
Expressed frustration: “This is not what I was looking for. Where is what I was looking for?” All the technical explanation cannot convey what a direct content presentation conveys in a few seconds. How does lemmy look like, what does it feel like, how can I use it, what people and topics are there?
- “I created an account and it asks me to login again”
He seemed to expect to be logged in after registration. Yeah, why not? Some sites do this, others do not. I also find it mildly annoying to log in after registration, to repeat myself.
- “A link from search takes me to another server and asks me to login again”
I spent 3 days learning lemmy and am still struggling with this. This will trip over so many users. https://midwest.social/c/cats will throw you out, but /c/cats@midwest.social hidden in a link works fine. Would be nice if lemmy could automatically do this for me when clicking on a link to another instance while being logged in.
- “If a human needs to explain how to use a platform […]”
Absolutely right, that’s a UX design smell. Your friend was lucky to have you to ask. Most users will be alone on their journey. A good portion will turn around when they find server talk where they expected a reddit scrolling substitute.
The process of choosing an instance should be simplified, be hidden from users. Advanced users can still have that freedom.
Sorry if I was harsh in my words at some points. It’s not because I despise lemmy, but because I love it and want to stay here. But I also loved to have so much people and content around me on reddit, to be part of the one page people turn to when they are unhappy with Google results. I want lemmy to shine, and to grow. To achieve this goal, it is imperative to review how we approach new users, because there is no other way for us to grow but to win them. Let’s help them help us. Make joining easy and fun.
I 100% agree with all of this. That’s why I joined kbin instead of Lemmy. I went to Lemmy, was greeted with basically a wall of text, and said “Well, shit, I only have a couple minutes right now, I guess I’ll have to figure this out later.” When I went to kbin.social, the content was front-and-center, the “Log In” and “Register” buttons were more or less where I expected them to be, and the process took less time than it would have taken to read and absorb Lemmy’s front-page documentation.
Beehaw was similar, although there was an extra text box in the registration section.
And now that I’m actually using the fediverse, it’s painfully obvious that I didn’t need to know anything that Lemmy was so intent on explaining to me. I log in, I see stuff, I click, I comment. I see a group I’m interested in, I click on the group name, and I click “Subscribe”. Do I understand how all these places connect together? Not in the slightest. But I also don’t have to. Not right now. I might want to, later, when I feel like I want to do something more advanced than post or comment on a cat picture, but for the time being, I am fully satisfied by just treating this place like “Reddit but powered by a mysterious black box.”
There are some QOL things I’d like to have (like the thing about links you mentioned, and a way to force Beehaw to stop automatically scrolling my feed as more stuff gets added, and the ability to turn on “open links in a new tab” by default) and kbin, in particular, has some weird quirks (like, if you start to make a comment, have to walk away and do something else, then come back and finish the comment, if you took too long, a weird error occurs and your comment vanishes irretrievably into limbo). But other than that, I’m happy using the service without knowing the technical details of how everything is hooked up together.
Thanks for sharing your story! Anecdotes like these can help to make it more user centered.
And now that I’m actually using the fediverse, it’s painfully obvious that I didn’t need to know anything that Lemmy was so intent on explaining to me. I log in, I see stuff, I click, I comment. I see a group I’m interested in, I click on the group name, and I click “Subscribe”. Do I understand how all these places connect together? Not in the slightest. But I also don’t have to.
Exactly! Those who do want to know will find ways to learn.
For me personally, it’s also much easier to learn when I’m in a context where I can apply the knowledge. That is definitely long after registration.
I can imagine how this technical welcome text came to be. Hard working people spent their free time to make all this possible, and acquired all the knowledge necessary. It was probably very well intended to share this knowledge with people who join. But most of them have a different focus.
There are some QOL things I’d like to have (like the thing about links you mentioned, and a way to force Beehaw to stop automatically scrolling my feed as more stuff gets added, and the ability to turn on “open links in a new tab” by default)
Haha, we have the same wishlist :)
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“I created an account and it asks me to login again”
He seemed to expect to be logged in after registration. Yeah, why not? Some sites do this, others do not. I also find it mildly annoying to log in after registration, to repeat myself.
It seems to me that he follows the link to another server and is asked to log in again. Different server, another account is needed.
Or that, yes. Technically you don’t need another account for another server.
For example, this link is relative to your home instance. But if I just paste the full link: https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/lemmytips it probably shows the page logged out.
Technically you don’t need another account for another server.
Technically you need another account if you want to post on another server.
For some reason the user landed on a different server with the same look and feel. When challenged to login (again in their experience) they got confused their credentials wouldn’t work. The new user expected a single-sign-on for ‘lemmy the social medium’.
Could be an early adopter issue that’ll be solved over time with wider use and more content, and people get to know what to expect from federation.
Technically you need another account if you want to post on another server.
Not sure if we’re talking past each other, but just to be clear:
Our conversation happens on lemmy.ml, while you are logged in on lemmy.pxm.nl, and I write from lemmy.click. So we can post comments on another server, without having an account on that server, enabled by federation.
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I agree that it sounds like your friend doesn’t want to put in the effort. But he’s right on a couple points. Lemmy is easy to learn and use, but that fact that you have to learn at all will scare most people away. People are used to immediate gratification. Sign up, maybe fill out a 2 sec questionnaire for your interests, enjoy. Lemmy isn’t streamlined to that level yet.
There were similar complains from Digg users migrating to Reddit. We all adapted.
He has a master’s degree in Computer Science and works as a software engineer
I doubt it, sincerely.
The only difference in the onboarding experience is honestly that you can register to any server instead of one. Then you just subscribe to communities.
There are all kinds of people here and if someone with Master’s Degree in CS can’t figure it out, then it’s 100% on him.
This ecosystem is different. If they don’t want to put the absolute minimum amount of effort to even read 2 paragraphs in the first page, then they don’t have anything to offer to this community and it would be best it they thought it is dead, honestly.
Lemmy does have some rough edges. The 0 at the front of the version number is supposed to mean that.
But really, some people will buy the crappiest early access game on steam and then complain that a beta version of a service that is actually trying to do something fairly complicated is not perfect for every use case.
He’s lazy. Or unmotivated. Or disinterested. Thousands of current users (including this Reddit refugee) are doing just fine here (there was a learning curve with Reddit, too, when it was young and lacked sophisticated API support).
