/r/BuyFromEU: "Let's settle the Reddit alternative discussion: Lemmy doesn't need to “beat Reddit”, it needs to feel effortless"
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If a user taps “subscribe,” store it locally. When they finally create an account, they should be able to “claim” those subscriptions. This is a small UX move that has an outsized effect on conversion.
Any evidence for this? Twitter tried something like this, but then moved to putting everything behind a log in wall so I'm led to believe that the latter has better guest-to-registration statistics.
That's not even going to be practically possible for people with no account. You could do it for the instance they're currently browsing from, but the cookie wouldn't carry to others if they found themselves browsing from another instance as the sort of "front end". Might be wrong, but that's how I understand cookies to work.
Then there's edge cases like them trying to psuedo-subscribe to a community that hasn't been pulled down to the instance they're on yet. If you wanted it to work like it does for a real user, that would have to be logged by the instance so it could fetch it. That would be open to a lot of abuse I would think. Unauthenticated visitors could force federation of illegal comms, or effectively anonymously DDOS the instance by overloading it with requests to pull down tons of comms. There's plenty of ways to conbat that, but it would undeniably break the concepts behind how federation is meant to work (for the sake of storage and server efficiency) if you allowed it to be kicked off by guest users.
So at best it would be a brittle thing, locked to the instance the guest was browsing at the time and restricted to comms already federated with the instance.
Not completely useless, but it would be a hell of a lot of work for so little benefit.
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people want a classical social media experience, and you will just not get that with lemmy.
Yep, to me the article indicates a fundamental misunderstanding.
They seem to want the same exact Reddit, just somewhere else. The commenters constantly mention “there isn’t a huge userbase” on the fediverse with no consideration of what a mainstream userbase is getting them.
They believe because Reddit (or Facebook, or Twitter, etc.) reached a certain mass, literally all social media has to do the same to be worth considering.
My guess is they're the late reddit accounts when reddit is already big and shit. They weren't around when reddit was just "small digg". Tbf I wasn't there as well.
I was there when reddit already have comments for posts and remember imgur is the image hosting site for reddit (with no culture and community of its own. Until the reddit file cabinet suddenly gained "sentience").
I suspect it's most likely those that cried about lemmy's "bad UI" only joined after reddit turned into the vomit inducing non chronologically sorted reddit.
Side note I have never browsed r/all ever, but I concede it's a necessity for the threadiverse. But it's all just for me to further curate what I want to see. I was never into whatever dogfood sorting spyware algos tried to force down.
Though I admit it took me several tries to understand federation and how it works.
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I can't think of any other site that does that. In fact, if I was using a site like that for a while and then lost all my subscriptions because my cookies got wiped, I might not come back.
Like it makes sense to me if an app does that. Is that what they could mean with it?
On an actual web browser I agree with you.
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I mean, there's piefed and the *bins, if we're being pedantic, but especially outside of the fediverse I don't think the distinction is too important.
Yeah, it also doesn't address the Concerned
poster. -
How delightfully European Union of them to debate debate debate in the face of a looming crisis.
Yes Lemmy has a lot of improving to do, but I'm not seeing many other alternatives!
The best way to get Lemmy/PieFed to improve is by using it. You can report issues and talk about them here, but talking about them in Reddit is talking to the wrong audience.
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My guess is they're the late reddit accounts when reddit is already big and shit. They weren't around when reddit was just "small digg". Tbf I wasn't there as well.
I was there when reddit already have comments for posts and remember imgur is the image hosting site for reddit (with no culture and community of its own. Until the reddit file cabinet suddenly gained "sentience").
I suspect it's most likely those that cried about lemmy's "bad UI" only joined after reddit turned into the vomit inducing non chronologically sorted reddit.
Side note I have never browsed r/all ever, but I concede it's a necessity for the threadiverse. But it's all just for me to further curate what I want to see. I was never into whatever dogfood sorting spyware algos tried to force down.
Though I admit it took me several tries to understand federation and how it works.
indeed, you make a good point. most of these people didn't experience reddit when reddit had "no userbase" compared to other social media.
but reddit was unique, and that is what drew people there. sadly, lemmy does not have that much "uniqueness" to show (being a reddit clone), besides being federated and fully open source.
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indeed, you make a good point. most of these people didn't experience reddit when reddit had "no userbase" compared to other social media.
but reddit was unique, and that is what drew people there. sadly, lemmy does not have that much "uniqueness" to show (being a reddit clone), besides being federated and fully open source.
To me, it kind of does! Lemmy (with copious blocking) comes as close as I’ve ever felt to what Reddit felt like in 2010.
“All” still requires a lot of filtering, but I see interesting stuff every day.
And I came back to read the other person’s comment, and you had replied! The person I replied to, I remembered the username. And it’s a really thoughtful reply! This happens a lot on smaller communities on Reddit as well, but the whole thing used to feel like that.
I see that on the fediverse pretty much every day! It’s always all about the (preferably kind) communities you build around specific things.
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I can't think of any other site that does that. In fact, if I was using a site like that for a while and then lost all my subscriptions because my cookies got wiped, I might not come back.
There's also the issue of how you'd tell between a new user and a user with an account on the wrong instance. Imagine how confusing it would be to hit subscribe, see it goes through and when you go to your mobile app it's not there.
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It doesn't help that Lemmy's web UI is different depending on the instance. Personally I find dbzero's really bad. But they might think that's the Lemmy web UI and not realise it's different on each instance.
Of course it's all subjective but I suspect the people complaining about the UI are likely users that have only known reddits "redesign", where as the older users will feel more at home on a default, unmodified Lemmy UI.
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My guess is they're the late reddit accounts when reddit is already big and shit. They weren't around when reddit was just "small digg". Tbf I wasn't there as well.
I was there when reddit already have comments for posts and remember imgur is the image hosting site for reddit (with no culture and community of its own. Until the reddit file cabinet suddenly gained "sentience").
I suspect it's most likely those that cried about lemmy's "bad UI" only joined after reddit turned into the vomit inducing non chronologically sorted reddit.
Side note I have never browsed r/all ever, but I concede it's a necessity for the threadiverse. But it's all just for me to further curate what I want to see. I was never into whatever dogfood sorting spyware algos tried to force down.
Though I admit it took me several tries to understand federation and how it works.
My guess is they're the late reddit accounts when reddit is already big and shit. They weren't around when reddit was just "small digg". Tbf I wasn't there as well.
I was on reddit back when it was just small digg, you are 100% correct.
These are a bunch of modern social media brainrotted people, for lack of a better term, who just need to get all the upvotes, need to get as much digitally mediated social validation as possible.
These people are the hivemind.
They want everything to be easy and convenient and accomdodate them, they'll yap for hours about how something should work and never do a damn actual thing to achieve it beyond 'spreading awareness'.
The fact that it took you a few attempts to figure out how to 'do' lemmy acts as a filter.
I'm not awake enough to be able to try and argue whether or not its... net better overall to have an easy, more difficult to censor and manipulate reddit alternative... or if allowing it to be easy to access just fundamentally does comprimise the system by way of the hivemind then eventually, inevitably taking over and becoming increasingly sycophantic and culty and sociopathic.
... but I can tell you that from a certain point of view, having to actually engage your brain a bit to join what is basically a network of web forums, well you can see see that as a feature, not a bug.
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It doesn't help that Lemmy's web UI is different depending on the instance. Personally I find dbzero's really bad. But they might think that's the Lemmy web UI and not realise it's different on each instance.
Of course it's all subjective but I suspect the people complaining about the UI are likely users that have only known reddits "redesign", where as the older users will feel more at home on a default, unmodified Lemmy UI.
... ironically i 99% use lemmy on my phone, lol.
I have also had multiple people so far on lemmy just get livid about how i block out my sentences and paragraphs... you know, to make sense on the phone i am typing them on, to look nice.
I've had people get legitimately angry that i formatted a comment for a phone, seemingly not even realizing that there are... what, at least 10 different mobile lemmy clients that are reasonably popular?
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To me, it kind of does! Lemmy (with copious blocking) comes as close as I’ve ever felt to what Reddit felt like in 2010.
“All” still requires a lot of filtering, but I see interesting stuff every day.
And I came back to read the other person’s comment, and you had replied! The person I replied to, I remembered the username. And it’s a really thoughtful reply! This happens a lot on smaller communities on Reddit as well, but the whole thing used to feel like that.
I see that on the fediverse pretty much every day! It’s always all about the (preferably kind) communities you build around specific things.
I agree. Since reddit has turned into whatever it is that they want now instead of the original "link aggregator with comments" that I started with and liked a lot, I feel that the threadiverse covers the era of reddit very well
And now I understand why people would go to /all on reddit before. With the lack of (or little) algorithm back then on reddit and (mostly) solely rely only on voting, /all really do can be a slot machine of interesting topics.
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My guess is they're the late reddit accounts when reddit is already big and shit. They weren't around when reddit was just "small digg". Tbf I wasn't there as well.
I was on reddit back when it was just small digg, you are 100% correct.
These are a bunch of modern social media brainrotted people, for lack of a better term, who just need to get all the upvotes, need to get as much digitally mediated social validation as possible.
These people are the hivemind.
They want everything to be easy and convenient and accomdodate them, they'll yap for hours about how something should work and never do a damn actual thing to achieve it beyond 'spreading awareness'.
The fact that it took you a few attempts to figure out how to 'do' lemmy acts as a filter.
I'm not awake enough to be able to try and argue whether or not its... net better overall to have an easy, more difficult to censor and manipulate reddit alternative... or if allowing it to be easy to access just fundamentally does comprimise the system by way of the hivemind then eventually, inevitably taking over and becoming increasingly sycophantic and culty and sociopathic.
... but I can tell you that from a certain point of view, having to actually engage your brain a bit to join what is basically a network of web forums, well you can see see that as a feature, not a bug.
By this point of my life on this floating rock we call Earth, I think having a filter is a good thing lol.
I'll be happy tobhelpbmy friends to jump in and guide through the filter. And if some of them aren't will to do it (much like reddit before it is changed targeting the lowest common denominator audience that is addicted to online validation), well I can't help them.
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reddit also has the google search privilege which makes hard to beat, it actively hides lemmy site.
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I disagree that having a variety of UIs is a bad thing. I wouldn't want every instance to look like dbzero! It also highlights that Lemmy is not a single platform, it's a federation of them. Heck even reddit has two UIs!
I'm not saying it's bad to have a variety of UIs, but that there's no "lemmy UI" because it all depends on which instance you land on. So when someone says "the lemmy UI is awful" then we don't really know what they mean, because they might have gone to dbzero and thought that's what "lemmy" looks like.
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They may not know the phone apps, and if they're on iOS there may not be any.
There are quite a few apps for Lemmy on IOS, actually it was a bit disheartening how many targeted exclusively IOS for a while or which were still web apps with IOS centered theming.
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reddit also has the google search privilege which makes hard to beat, it actively hides lemmy site.
Kagi has a Fediverse Forums search lens by default. But doesn't really say which sites it searches.
Not meant as an endorsement, actually cancelled my Kagi subscription recently because it's multiple times each month and often blocks my VPN.
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I actually think this post has a lot of solid points, many of which I have argued myself in the past. One thing was funny though. He says:
Today's Reddit is a phone product. The “just use the web UI” crowd is not representative of mainstream behavior.
and then several users in the comments were turned off by the Web UI of Lemmy.
Can't make everyone happy I guess, Lemmy definitely was built by and for people that still remember the old reddit UI.
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I actually think this post has a lot of solid points, many of which I have argued myself in the past. One thing was funny though. He says:
Today's Reddit is a phone product. The “just use the web UI” crowd is not representative of mainstream behavior.
and then several users in the comments were turned off by the Web UI of Lemmy.
The moment reddit users went from being primarily old.reddit to m.reddit was the final day of decent reddit, imo.
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I'm not saying it's bad to have a variety of UIs, but that there's no "lemmy UI" because it all depends on which instance you land on. So when someone says "the lemmy UI is awful" then we don't really know what they mean, because they might have gone to dbzero and thought that's what "lemmy" looks like.
I understand what you're saying, but what you want (conformity of UIs) is just not possible to enforce on a decentralized network.
