This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.

Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.

What can we do?

  • ProdigalFrog
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    2 months ago

    Greenleaf is pretty massively exaggerating about the extent of defederation, as only a handful ever get defederated regularly, certainly not enough to call it ‘wars’.

    As for UX, there’s definitely room for lots of improvements, especially in making it easier to explore another instances local communities from within your own insinstance without explicitly subbing to them all or using lemmyverse.net.

    But I don’t think the very concept of different instances is truly a barrier or bad UX, that other user is just giving lazy excuses for not switching away from Reddit.

    If that was a legitimate issue, MMO’s (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn’t have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.

    Even if Lemmy was one big simple centralized server, that user would just come up with another reason they couldn’t switch.

    “Oh, it’s too small, my niche communities aren’t there”

    “The UI isn’t as nice”

    “The mod tools aren’t as good”

    Etc.

    • .Donuts
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      142 months ago

      If that was a legitimate issue, MMO’s (which also often have servers the player needs to choose) wouldn’t have the userbase they do. Nor would Email have taken off.

      But in an MMO, you still get the same content no matter what server you choose. Over here, it directly impacts what content you can interact with based on (de)federation.

      • Blaze (he/him)
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        172 months ago

        If you joined a German-speaking WoW server as a non-speaking German, the experience was going to be subpar

        • .Donuts
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          32 months ago

          Yes, and if you join a German-speaking instance as a non-German speaking user, the experience will also be subpar. Hence I talked about content, not language.

          • Blaze (he/him)
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            52 months ago

            I just remembered that WoW nowadays offers a lot of different experiences: Classic, Seasons of Mastery, Retail, etc.

            And people get different experiences based on the server they pick.

      • @hemmes@lemmy.world
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        52 months ago

        I’m on three different instances and the sort by All-hot feed is nearly identical.

        I’m not on Beehaw or Hexbear, but those instances make it pretty well known they block a lot of other instances.

    • @hinterlufer@lemmy.world
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      132 months ago

      eh, back when the “exodus” was happening it felt like every second post is about defederation. Nowadays you don’t hear much about it anymore, but if you only looked back then I see how you could come to that conclusion.

    • @Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      72 months ago

      I specifically remember looking up tables of who defederates from who and what instances allow NSFW or downvoting because this was an issue among some of the top instances back then.

      I ended up making 4 different accounts over 2 months until I landed on a server I’m happy with. That will never be acceptable to any normal user.

      Every time someone brings up these issues, people here downplay them like you are doing it right now and nothing is ever done about it.

      • 3DMVR
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        12 months ago

        I looked this up when joining a month ago because I saw hella posts on it and joining world to not see the piracy community didnt help

        • @Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          22 months ago

          Honestly, joining a community just for the type of content they have or what they filter is useless. Best approach for me is to have access to everything and then filter what you don’t like by yourself.