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Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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The biggest UX issues, in my opinion, is the process of choosing an instance and content discovery.
When you go to "join lemmy", rather than choosing a username, you're presented a big list of instances, and you have no idea what that means and what it means for your experience if you choose one. Even though in reality it doesn't really matter, just having the list paraylyses the user as it's not a process they're used to. Users are likely asking themselves:
Sometimes I think it would be best if we could have some kind of read-only instance people can create an account on and get stuck in first, then choose an instance to sign up to once they understand it. The instance would be locked down so they couldn't create any communities. So basically when they they're directed to join-lemmy and go to sign up, they create an account on that instance right away and get started.
On the discovery front, a potential idea would be to allow communities to have a specific category tags field. When a user signs up, the host instance could have a page that they're directed to (this would be controlled by the instance, so they wouldn't have to have it enabled) which lets the users pick some topics they're interested in and can then subscribe to the communities right away.
The analysis paralysis of having to pick an instance is definitely the biggest hurdle in my opinion. I don't think a read-only instance is the solution though, at least not one that requires registration. That just adds another step, which I think would further confuse people. The simplest way to onboard new people is to just shove them onto the biggest instance, but I know that kind of goes against the ideology and creed of the fediverse. There were endless debates about it during the Reddit exodus of 2023.
People need to stop sending people to "join ___" sites. I get why they are, or at least were, necessary, but they're totally superfluous when users are making recommendations to other users.
Just recommend a website for them to join. Word of mouth + systematized signup makes zero sense.
But the crux is which one do you recommend? We don't want to send everyone to the same instance otherwise it'll end up becoming dominant (see Lemmy World).
Ideally we shouldn't need to go through this motion of trying to work out which instance to choose or recommend one for them, they should be able to do that themselves after getting their feet wet.
Based on what I've learnt in network science, I've got bad news for you: real-world networks tend to follow power-law distributions.
Lemmy, being a social network, is unlikely to be an exception. Some instances are going to become hubs and the rest would be peripheral.
Sadly you're probably right. It would be nice if there were some load balancing mechanism where restrigrations could be shut for the larger instances where it recognises that it's grown much larger than the rest, and recommend altnerative instances.
Being already established, you have a few advantages over the newbies. You know about how a few different instances federate and work, and you know whether or not you like your instance.
Recommend your instance. Or if you wouldn't, whether because it's niche or doesn't work well in general, recommend a generic instance, even if it is .world, because it will probably work and give a good experience.
"Lemmy has 47k monthly active users
Feel free if you have any questions"
For the rationale: https://feddit.uk/post/23882306
I think a good solution would be to randomly send people to one of the top 5 instances that aren't very political (What ever that might be)
According to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy, the top 5 (where top 5 is defined by user count) are:
After there's:
Lemmy.world is pretty safe and generic, but it's already huge (173k users vs 33k of lemm.ee).
Lemm.ee is also a safe bet.
Hexbear is totally out of question
dbzer0 is great, but it leans heavily in a political direction
Federated with hexbear and lemmygrad
https://feddit.uk/post/23882306
So that basically just leaves lemmy.world :|
I guess the question is: what's more important: trying to avoid putting most users on a single instance, or just accept that people are going to see some hexgrad nonsense in their feeds?
Only if you want top 10 instances.
sopuli.xyz and discuss.online both defederate hexbear and lemmygrad, are reliable and established
They are my recommendations nowadays
https://feddit.uk/post/23882306
Being able to just browse without signup and see largely federated content would pull in a lot of people. I am new to federated concepts, but would a generic, non-profit "home page" that's browseable without signup is possible? Apps like Voyager could dump newbies into that until they want to post/interact?
Yeah you can browse an instance without being logged in, so that would be possible.
Exactly this - Join-Lemmy.org has some (minor) UI and text issues. I'm also not quite happy about the sorting of the instances and the selection there. If f.e. you chose "General -> English" during onboarding, you get this screen here:
Hexbear? Some random 11 user instance from finland? Lemmy.world nowhere to be seen? They are randomizing the instances, which kind of makes sense to prevent the bigger ones from growing even more, but which might confuse new users.
But those are minor UI quirks that can be solved. All those reddit couch warriors that claim that everything should be completely redone exactly how they want it to be are insane. Normal users are able to understand the concept of instances.
Lemmy.world is excluded because it represents more than 30% of all active Lemmy users, thats too much. And yes the list is somewhat randomized so that you get different instances at the top each time. You could store the order in a cookie to keep it consistent for each user. And you are welcome to improve all this.
Read only instance would put them off too. The best solution, IMO:
By read-only, I mean they couldn't create any communities. So essentially it would be an instance that has accounts but nothing else. Users would still be able to vote and comment on other commnities and subscribe. They could stay on it if they wanted to, but of course they wouldn't be able to create any communities.
That doesn't help at all, I'd say. Most people won't ever create communities.
Like the other person said, 99% of users never create communities anyway. I don't really know what this read-only instance is meant to solve.
It would solve the problem of choosing an instance, as the join Lemmy process would sign you up to that automatically rather than making them choose an instance.