we need more users
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Let's stop working on "Lemmy app" , "mbin app", "PieFed app", "Mastodon app" and just embrace ActivityPub as the single API.
There is a difference between Mastodon and Lemmy because Mastodon is user-centric and Lemmy is content-centric. I wrote about this here
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I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
Tell your musician friends to find me here:
https://lemmy.world/c/IndepthIndie
Actually, you know what? I'll give a free guitar lesson to the first 10 people to make a post in that group.
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Lemmynsfw coming in clutch
I thought lemmynsfw hid their content for unregistered users as well so not really
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I do. But every other comment is about how the thing this community is about sucks.
Lemmy really has a problem with "fun". Everything is bad and you need to be told about it.
What communities, out of interest? Piefed has a wider range of options for following comms.
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I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
I’m feeling very burnt out. Lemmy is kinda an endless stream of political doom and gloom. For context, I’m in the US and already stressed out by our political situation. But I don’t come here to see more doom and gloom. It’s getting to the point where I think I need to get off for my mental health.
Then there are all the people who if you don’t agree exactly with their opinion they downvote you to hell. You have left leaning politics but not my flavor of left? Downvote! You hate enshitification and big tech privacy practices, but you use a single piece of software that isn’t FOSS? Downvote!
It’s so exhausting. I absolutely hate Reddit but I miss going on there and just laughing at how someone’s TV is too high. I miss laughing at how some restaurant serves food of shovels instead of plates.
And that’s not even getting into the lack of content. That part I understand requires users like myself to be as active as possible. But it’s hard being active when I feel so burnt out from the other stuff here.
Tbh, idk if these issues are specific to Lemmy or just the internet as a whole. I can only speak to the slice of the internet I find myself in. But I just wanna see people that are excited about things: photography, 3d printing, weird keyboards, etc. And that exists here, but it’s drowned out by all the doom and gloom.
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status. part of the impetus of the development of piefed was a frustration with how the lemmy devs treated people who tried to get onboarded to help with the development of lemmy. i can go into more depth about how this is a reflection of how the lemmy devs see the world, but i don't necessarily feel like hashing all that out when i have bigger fascists to fry
Piefed seems to have its own share of issues, not using ActivityPub protocols which play nice with the rest of the Fediverse (Lemmy, Mastodon etc) for new features and instead prioritizing on their own platform and seeing the Fediverse as a secondary thing.
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I'm a reddit user and that's also where I first heard about lemmy the first time.
Yesterday I decided to give it a try, current events pushed me away from everything American and so I thought it was about time.
I searched for something like 'lemmy getting started' and landed on this site:
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.htmlSo the first greeting is a wall of text. After I read through it, I found myself here:
https://join-lemmy.org/instancesNow I got a bunch of options with no real way to evaluate what's what. I spent some time there looking through the options and didn't really know what to choose and what the impact would be. I used a search engine again to look for some opinions about the biggest ones which lead me nowhere, mostly.
So I kinda gave up and selected programming.dev because that's close enough to what I do professionally. I clicked on join and was presented with this
https://programming.dev/signupSo I don't know if that differs from instance to instance, but you need a moment to process this. The first few fields are obvious but then it starts to get a little weird. Instead of a checkbox or even implicit accepting of TOS and privacy policy (by registering here you agree to....) you have to take or copy paste that exact sentence into that answer box with a preview button(?) and then fill in the captcha. After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
But it didn't end here. Because I found that the webui wasn't that great on mobile, I wanted an Android app. So I ended up here: https://join-lemmy.org/apps
And yet again was confronted with a bunch options I somehow had to evaluate. I'm still in the process finding an app I really like.
Now I know this is no rocket science, and having options is a good thing usually.
But still considering the average usually not tech savvy user, all of that is too much by quite a bit. That's overwhelming for the majority of people.
This whole thing needs to be a 10 second streamlined process. There should be one button to get you started. The instance selection site tells you: 'You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn't matter which one you choose.'
So if that's the case, why bother the user with it? I admit I know jack shit about the fediverse, but if I were to design such a thing, I'd separate the IdP (identity provider) from the service/content providers. Have a couple of them redundantly, hosted by different parties so one entity can not shut down everything. Let the user register once, replicate that identity across the IdPs and let some interest selection wizard determine which content instances the use should be added to.
I know that's a big architecture change and will never happen. So maybe have that one obvious registration routine for a user and choose a first instance for the user based on interests or randomly (from a curated list to prevent users landing on some extreme instances) if the user can not be bothered to fill in their interests.
Have one default app which is good and recommended that. Let the app have sensible defaults (like the sorting thing), present most popular content first to hook the user.
Let the user look for alternatives later if they want to do that.
Don't let the user do all the homework upfront before they even know whether they even care and if it's worth the effort. Most people simply won't do it.
PS. Nope I do not know about 'Piefed'. I'll check it out later. It wasn't mentioned on all that sites that I looked at and that's part of the problem.
That's just my 2 cents.
Thanks for your feedback!
You landed on https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html to get started but you should have landed on https://join-lemmy.org/ which is a much simpler UI, i think. Somebody sent you the wrong link. I think, there should definitely be a more prominent link to the actual "sign up here" page.
I’d separate the IdP (identity provider) from the service/content providers
That is indeed a good idea and i've never heard it formulated like this before, but i gotta think about it now.
After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
That is definitely a big problem that should be changed; I'm not sure but maybe you should get an E-Mail after your registration is successful and maybe you should also be able to log in and use the account immediately (up to a limited extent) without waiting for manual confirmation.
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The hurdle of registration and getting into the Fediverse is, in my view, too high for many people.
I had to guide my brother step by step to get him into the Fediverse.
I think that’s where it often fails.
It needs to be much easier to join — then more people would probably come in.Lemmy specifically needs UX improvements in signup. I've seen many Reddit users get stuck or confused when trying to signup for a Lemmy instance.
I think this should be a big focus of v1.1 (v1.0 is already a victim of scope creep and needs to get finished)
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I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
me the next time i see some reddit user
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Someone in here already said it, but ‘Lemmy’ is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn’t bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I’m not sure I’ll stay.
You can say that again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LemmyReally muddles up the search results about lemmy.
Lemmy standing for "Marxist-Leninist" surely is off-putting to some. Might be better to re-brand it as "Feddit" (federated Reddit).
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I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
: (
Edit Actually after taking a step back and looking at how many thoughtful comments and conversations have happened on this thread, I am heartened.
There is a lot of passion here, we are just fighting against unbelievably strong currents.
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I agree. New user introduction is very poor. Took me ages just to choose an instance - and that was in no small part because I'm here not only to escape the enshittified chokepoint capitalism of american big tech, but also because I'm utterly sick of the domination of US centric points of view and censorship. Even though i know communities are not instance locked, I wanted an instance that is not likely to be managed in the same way. Time will tell if I chose well or poorly
Fwiw that's a very popular instance you are on, so I think you will likely enjoy it? But if not, then that is the beauty of the Fediverse: you can always hop over to some other one if you wanted.
Like email providers: if gmail doesn't suit you, then switch to another one, or even self-host your own if that sounds appealing:-P.
Note here there is zero advertising: none. Therefore, no incentive to try to "(ab)use" you as the product. Conversely, features offered to you are significantly slower to be developed (honestly PieFed is so very far ahead of Lemmy in that respect, e.g. offering keyword filters such as "Musk" or "Trump", and advanced AI slop detection, etc.). So instead of thinking how different platforms will fall over themselves trying to compete for your "business", think along the lines instead of how you can match up with other like-minded folks. And at some point you'll want to contribute - perhaps code development, or donations, though what the Threadiverse needs most is just participation, as in content posted to it, the more thoughtful the better.
So far you are off to a fantastic start, welcome!
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Hot take: the biggest issue is actually ever entering a community and seeing zero comments. Most reddit addiction stems from wanting to read comments, so I think people should add a comment to something if they're upvoting and they see that the thread has zero comments.
Nothing eliminates enthusiasm like seeing 0 comments on every post in a community, especially if that community is driven by bots.
Communities driven by bots should die
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How about bridging over to bluesky? If they could follow and comment threads, the userbase explodes 10-fold (compared to the current exposure to mastodon).
See this thread: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/372
Wow that could be huge for us! I subscribed to that issue, eagerly awaiting the day that's enabled
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Damn there's barely anyone here
There's good, actually.
Smaller communities don't fill up with annoying bots and toxic personalities
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I'm a very new user who wanted to give this a chance, here are the friction points from my point of view:
- The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn't help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
- Content discovery sucks ass. My feed stayed mostly the same since I started using Lemmy. I'm presented the same shit over and over again. I'm not sure if it's something that I do wrong, if there is just no content or if that's a side effect of 'no tracking at all' but either way the experience is just bad
- Someone in here already said it, but 'Lemmy' is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn't bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I'm not sure I'll stay.
In short the user experience is abysmal.
@dessalines@lemmy.ml for the love of god please fix the onboarding
Also go full Elon Mulk and artificially boost lemmy.sdf content they have a lot of good OC
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How about bridging over to bluesky? If they could follow and comment threads, the userbase explodes 10-fold (compared to the current exposure to mastodon).
See this thread: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/372
i think the main issue is that bluesky/mastodon are user-centric (like Twitter) while Lemmy is content-centric (like Reddit) i wrote about this here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/52567886
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I've been here a few years now and I can say Lemmy's got issues. You can't come on here and have a good time anymore when all it's about is trump trump trump and Linux Linux Linux it gets old. I wanna escape from reality a bit sometimes and there's few areas to subscribe to that gives any joy anymore.
On a long enough timeline, every Lemmy thread eventually becomes one of the following:
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ACAB
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Trump bad
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FOSS good
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Reddit bad
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Socialism (generally, via vanguard party) good
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Tankies (i.e. #5) bad
Not that I disagree with most of the above, but we need some normies in here to balance things out, so invite them and don't demonize them. That's made trickier by Reddit banning people for talking about the Fediverse/Lemmy, so you have to be clever about it.
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ml is run by the devs of Lemmy so unfortunately that's not realistic, you could be missing on a ton of information if you want to subscribe to Lemmy development or information related communities
those posts get crossposted anyways, you wouldn't be missing much
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This would struggle due to reddit API and compute power requirements
IIRC the EU released a law a few months ago that forces big internet communication platforms to open their API to third-party clients.
this applied to whatsapp i think, i'm not sure whether it also applies to reddit but it might be worth investigating if somebody has too much time on their hands
Reddit would probably sooner just lop off their entire EU userbase than comply.
No offense to Europeans because I love y'all, but you are a drop in the bucket for global (English) internet usage.
