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?

  • KichaeEnglish
    111·
    8 hours ago

    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.

    • blackn1ght@feddit.ukEnglish
      5·
      8 hours ago

      Just recommend a website for them to join.

      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.

      • SharpieThunderflareEnglish
        3·
        6 hours ago

        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.

      • Endmaker@ani.socialEnglish
        8·
        8 hours ago

        We don’t want to send everyone to the same instance otherwise it’ll end up becoming dominant (see Lemmy World)

        From 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.

        • blackn1ght@feddit.ukEnglish
          1·
          7 hours ago

          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.

      • AnonomousWolf@lemm.eeOPEnglish
        11·
        7 hours ago

        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)