Hey everyone, I’m honestly really liking Lemmy so far. Maybe that’s because it feels so much like browsing reddit 10 years ago and I think it’s safe to say many of us have migrated from the blackout. I’d been a Reddit user since 2010 so I’ve witnessed the slow decline over the years but popping here has really driven home how corporate it started to feel–less like a genuine hub of community and more like a manufactured product with low effort content and some genuine discussion/input peppered throughout.
That said, does anyone feel the idea of a federated platform might be confusing to some less network-savvy users? There’s other successful multi-server platforms like Discord but somehow for me the idea of a ‘chatroom’ versus something more like a forum/board seems like it would make more sense to a less informed user. I could see hearing that posts are aggregating from other sites or being cross-visible confusing to individuals who understand web usage as, ‘visit site–post to site–view content on site’.
Does that make sense? lol Anyways, loving the site so far–hope to see it grow!
It will absolutely.
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The average non-tech savvy person will be extremely confused about how federated services operate. You say “join lemmy’, and they say, 'ok, what’s the site?” and then you need to explain, well, you need to pick one of about four thousand instances, and then only go there when you want to sign in. Now they’re already confused. That can then be explained 'It’s like e-mail, lots of different servers to get email, but they all work together." But this doesn’t hit as well because a website is not e-mail, and so interconnected websites are not immediately intuitive. And as soon as you start going into any level of technical details, the average person just tunes out and decides “I don’t want to deal with this crap.”
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If they pick an instance (Like Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works) that allows free signup, they won’t have too much of a problem. If they pick one that has questions to answer and then a manual approval process that is COMPLETELY opaque, they will nope the fuck out immediately and not even bother to find other instances. Heck, I was turned off of Lemmy for several days because of this, and I’m very tech savvy, and have been doing this sort of crap forever. I signed up first at Lemmy.one, which eventually got my login active, but took 3 days. When I saw no indication of that signup working, though, I tried Beehaw. That STILL has not been activated and it’s been 5 or 6 days, and of course, there’s no indication of what’s going on during that time…it’s just a spinning wheel. Not until I went to an instance that didn’t have these ridiculous manual approvals did I begin using Lemmy. The average user is not going to bother with that.
These are going to be the biggest things that hold Lemmy back (there are also some serious usability issues with the main feed, concerning repeat posts showing for DAYS, and the autorefresh everywhere, which pushes content down constantly if you’re in the New feed).
Honestly I think people are making it more complicated than it is. Like everyone tries to compare it to email, but guess what I don’t know how email works either. And that’s fine, I don’t need to understand it. I type words, hit send, tech magic happens, and somebody reads more words. I’d say, just stop trying to explain the technical stuff behind lemmy.
I agree the servers with vetted sign-ups are a major hurdle. I tried behaw first, but I only gave it 15 minutes of waiting before trying to find a new server and now I’m here. I’d tell people to just go with specific open servers, create an account, and boom reddit replacement. The only other thing that needs explained is that some communities are on different servers, but that just means you hit “all” instead of “local” to search. Otherwise it’s basically reddit.
My opinion is people need to stop trying to explain the fediverse in detail, nobody cares, nobody needs to know, it’s just creating confusion. People don’t know how any of their services work and don’t care. Just tell them how to get setup in as painless a way as possible.
Yeah I just tell people to join lemmy.world or beehaw and look for “all” instead of local. If they’re interested, they’ll find out about instances later.
My dumbass thought ‘local’ meant popular in my geo location and ‘all’ is worldwide when I first joined 😅
Funny that you mention two very popular instances, one of which is now defederated from the other, so content between them isn’t shared. I agree with OP that a lot of people are just going to throw up their hands if they hit something like that early on.
I’m generally getting the hang of it, and get why we have situations like this defederation thing happening, but I’ve also been a software engineer for close to 40 years. I made a personal decision not to recommend it to some of my family members because I don’t think it’s ready for them. I think an app that automated things like subscribing to communities on other instances would go a long way.
I tried behaw first, but I only gave it 15 minutes of waiting before trying to find a new server and now I’m here.
I gave it a couple of weeks, never got an email about whether my account was approved or denied. It was as transparent as mud. I mentioned it on IRC, and someone said “Oh just keep trying different servers.” Initially when I looked at the list a lot of them expressed that they were for people of leftist political leaning, for various countries specifically, LGBTQ+, POC. Joining a server was a complicated process of “What do I join? Will I be welcome there? What is their process? Why am I not seeing any answer?”
Then there’s finding communities. You can list them, and for all instances, but then it’s quite a massive list to sort through. Searching is hit or miss, and depends on knowing that you have to specifically try to search all instances. Community names aren’t super easy to discern so you have to try various forms of your search terms. And trying to do the “reddit like” syntax of /c/<area of interest> only works on your present server, so unless you know the exact name of the instance you want to try that community on to use the @<lemmy.instance> syntax, it won’t work.
See Bitcoin. And Mastadon. UX dev’s tend to not be front in line when developing the next random technology alternative.
It’s funny how all these things are either ignored or even ridiculed when not understood. I didn’t understand crypto and nfts and mastodon. I ridiculed my SO about the first two but trusted he knew what he was doing and when i saw results and success I learned and got a bit involved myself just enough to add to my retirement. But it’s funny, with Lenny he won’t bother learning about it and makes fun of me for even mentioning it. He was sending me reddit links and I told him at the very least screenshot as I’m not clicking on those. I guess he’ll come around eventually but until he understands how it works he will just get annoyed anytime I mention lemmy lol!
100% agree. I was a redditor for a decade, decided to try lemmy and heard beehaw was a popular one. Tried to sign up, saw they require manual approval with a reason and thought “well fuck” and assumed all servers were the same.
If it weren’t for a reddit post a few days later mentioning that some don’t require the approval, I would never have tried again
The issue is explaining it to them like that, just tell them the instance that you use or is the most popular one that is not shit, and when they go to the site, they will see the sign up button and they can join and learn from there. After joining an instance you can mostly use lemmy the same way as reddit, I already got my brother and gf to join and they are about as “normie” as it gets.
I mean, it’s all about the client. As long as the client makes it seamless, it’ll just feel like another sub/community, regardless of the instance it’s on. They don’t really need to care about or understand federation. Just sign up. Consume content. Ggez
I think this is where the crux of the matter is. It’s early days still for Lemmy, and where we are right now is great I feel.
However, the user experience for an average user is probably quite confusing. With other platforms you just go to the platform page, sign up, and done. Here you’re greeted with an explanation of the architecture, then you have to find an index of servers, and all that is probably quite overwhelming for some.
I spoke to my roomie about it, and he basically dismissed it saying “eh I might look into it when I have time to waste” - the platform simply wasn’t too approachable to him, and he is quite tech savvy!
Over time I think it might be good to maybe not abstract away, but at least be less in your face about the federation. Streamlining the user onboarding experience would go a long way I think.
I think this comment 100% reflects how I feel as well, and I especially agree with your roommate. I’m a decently tech savvy person as well and between learning about federation and overthinking which instance to join it took 20-30 minutes to join Lemmy. I think the people in my life who don’t enjoy stuff like this as much will need me to help set up Lemmy or they won’t join at all.
I agree with you.
On Mastodon, a few weeks ago this topic was raised after the default mobile apps started to streamline signups for the “mastodon.social” server (equivalent to lemmy.ml here). Many were displeased by it, saying that “we cannot have only one big instance, it’s Twitter all over again” and something on that line.
But I think it is a good thing, personally, especially since mastodon have an account migration feature. Let the people experience the service, then give them the choices. Other apps and servers use this approach (eg. Mammoth for Mastodon app, Vivaldi browser’s instance…)
Lemmy is not as mature right now as Mastodon was during the Twitter migration. This is a challenge, but presents some opportunities for the devs and the community to see what works and what didn’t work for all this federation thing. But it does have potential to be “mainstream”.
Someone will eventually get smart and stop talking about the fediverse and just build their platform on the fediverse. Then, people will flock to that platform and it will happen to be fediverse connected, allowing people to share content via an open standard.
This. I mean, you have to expect the community who built the thing to be excited by the thing, but if they want it to be a broader community, then the emphasis has to be on what gets the crowd engaged.
Having said that, I don’t think this or any platform should try to be all things to all men. It should have an identity and a focus, and it may not be for everyone - other communities will be right for other people.
I don’t think the federation in itself is an issue. We just need to figure out how to present it, and integrate everything.
I agree. It was presented confusingly, and made me think it was a lot more complex than it was. After I chose a server, it basically isn’t very different in experience from a non federated site.
If we had a better way to select a server (vs “here’s a list, good luck!”) Then I don’t think it’d be an issue at all
I feel like the focus on explaining federation and the fediverse can be overwhelming and confusing for new mainstream users.
Instead of focusing on the technical details, it might be more helpful to simply direct them to a few major servers (instances) like lemmy.world, beehaw.org, and lemmy.ml and tell them to make an account (or lurk) and explore. The advanced features, namely being able to subscribe to communities in other instances, should be eased into it later.
That is something I think kbin.social has done a better job of. Yes, there are other instances of kbin, but new users are told start with that one and slowly branch out from there.
And for those interested in seeing lemmy’s growth, this page is amazing: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
“The advanced features, namely being able to subscribe to communities in other instances, should be eased into it later”
I understand this and I would at first agree, but subscribing to communities is basically the most important thing and it’s frustrating/deterrent to learn that it’s on other websites and you can’t directly subscribe just like you can on other websites like you might on Reddit or Facebook or any other aggregator
