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 😅
Not dumb! We’re all new to this!
Yeah I think during design, they sometimes forget and use terminology that makes sense out of a federation perspective rather than newcomers. “Local” could as well have been named “This Server” and it would be much more clear.
Same here but I was confused because I didn’t give any location permissions, lt.
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.
What do you mean one is defederated from the other? I’m on lemmy.world and can see all beehaw communities just fine.
I’m new to this as well, but I believe you’ll find that you can see their posts, but you won’t be able to contribute to them, and they won’t see what is posted to either of those instances.
You’re seeing older posts from before it was defederated.
What do you mean one is defederated from the other. I’m on lemmy.world and can see communities from beehaw just fine.
Yes, just send them to e.g. lemmy.world, they don’t care about the details, nor do they need to.
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.
I was mad confused by “servers” in Minecraft, but my kids got it at 6 years old. We’ll figure this out, too.
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!
You just described my entire journey for my first two days on Lemmy
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
concerning repeat posts showing for DAYS
This bothers me a fair bit, I had a post about someone using comic sans as their programming font as the top post for days. Someone’s wacky font choices are just not that interesting I’m sorry.
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.
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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”.
I like the suggestion idea, except it should not just be one instance. I think it would be a great idea to show the top 2 or 3 so that one just doesn’t completely dominate
Very much this. A normal user doesn’t care about federation and much less wants to spend extra effort to get around it.
And I’m pretty sure they’re working to make the default web version of Lemmy work more seamlessly.
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.
Yeah i think people don’t really need to understand how the fediverse works but just use it. When it’s properly integrated into the search it doesn’t really matter if you know or not
A bit like Bluesky?
The issue with bluesky is it creates its own proprietary protocol. Nothing else is compatible with it. Lemmy and Mastodon (and countless others) use the ActivityPub protocol.
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
The fragmentation of communities needs to be addressed. The fact is that most people just want to consume content. There needs to be a client-side solution that helps less tech-savvy users to more easily consume content from similar communities.
Agreed. A sort of multireddit that combines similar communities is needed, though I don’t know if that would be better served as something individual users make for themselves, or as an official combination made by multiple communities banding together.
That makes sense, and if you’re talking about being purely read only, it can all be cached relatively cheaply
reddit has fragmentation as well. I think over time the more popular ones will win out and less popular will sorta wither away. Gaming is a good example. Reddit has games, gaming, pcgaming,pcmasterrace, patientgamers, etc…
Seeing a similar rush to land grab here as well. Basically it’ll sort itself out is my point and probably isn’t much different from early days of reddit or hell even modern day reddit.
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
I mean you don’t have to link people to join-lemmy. We can just link them to lemmy.ml or whatever and using it is exactly like reddit.
Federation should not be an issue for users, I think we could make the front-end hide most of the complexity that it brings. There are only a few things that are harder now:
- discovering communities outside your own instance (this is now mostly done through a website that lists communities)
- logging in when you receive a link to a post on another instance (you have to go to your own instance, login there, and search for the post again)
- creating a community on another instance (this requires an account on the other instance to create the community, after that they can add you as a mod)
One of the things that could be improved is changing the login page to add least add something about Federation, so users won’t try to log in on another instance with the credentials of their home instance.
Your second bullet point is the one I have wanted fixed badly as soon as I started using lemmy. I want there to be a small button at the top of posts that takes me to that same post but through the server where my account is. Idk how that would work though. Maybe a browser addon that remembers where my accounts live? I wish I had the knowledge to make that sort of thing.
Sorry I deleted and reposted this comment, having an issue I’m trying to figure out.
This would require a browser extension or a central redirection server (similar to how single sign on is implemented between multiple URLs). The central server approach won’t really fit well with the decentralized concept, although that server only needs to know your Lemmy instance and will only redirect users.
A browser extension could easily inject some kind of button in the page, and it would be easy enough for the browser extension to know your own Lemmy instance. I’m not sure if there is an easy URL to a specific post on a certain instance though, for example this post is https://feddit.nl/post/39577 for me and does not contain any information that this post is actually on [email protected]. Those post URLs work fine if your home instance is aware about the post, but won’t work if nobody has subscribed to that community.
Why a browser addon? My first approach would be to have the client do the job. Link to the page via the current instance, and ask the server to fetch it if it doesn’t exist.
This is about a user browsing on another Lemmy instance. For example, a user from lemmy.world receives a link on a chat app to a post on beehaw.org. Now he wants to reply to that post, to do so the user has to go to the same post on their home instance. Beehaw.org has no idea that the user has an account on lemmy.world, so they can’t just redirect the user. It is very difficult for Lemmy instances to share this data, as browsers have built in protections to prevent websites from sharing common identifiers (those were used to track people over multiple websites).
A menu could be added where the user can select their instance, but that would still require Beehaw.org to know about the existence of the user’s home instance. This could still give issues with smaller instances, that are not well federated with other instances.
Oh, I see. I was thinking of opening links within Lemmy.
I’m not sure if there is an easy URL to a specific post on a certain instance though, for example this post is https://feddit.nl/post/39577 for me and does not contain any information that this post is actually on [email protected].
You should be able to see a very colorful button on every post and comment, this button will link to the post/comment on the instance it was sent from.
Ah, thanks! That works, and you can easily search for that link in your own Reddit instance, and it will fetch it to your home server if it was not yet available. That’s actually a very nice feature. I had no idea what that colourful image was, but it makes sense when you know it is the Fediverse logo.
I think in the end the most important things will be a good UI, a clean and inviting look, maybe easy-to-understand guides and of course lots of great content. As soon as all of this exists, then the mainstream will have it easier to use Lemmy. An easy, flawless experience goes a long way and taking away any obstacle to get active here will help on the long run.
It is; I’ve seen some Reddit users complain about how the fediverse isn’t immediately easy to use and is too complicated and confusing
which is understandable, but also it feels like some of those who are complaining about it (I am stressing right now that I don’t mean all of them) straight up don’t want to have to learn about it; they want their content immediately and they want it as simple as pushing a button
Why should they have to learn anything?
It’s not like they owe us effort to get to know the platform, the platform has to be inviting instead.
Reddit is relatively easy to get started, you can just scroll through a bunch of default subs and get going. That’s not easily replicated here.
Yep, I feel like there should be something like default subs here as well. Just a curated list with mainstream communities to get started.
Why should they have to learn anything?
Learning’s good?! Not gonna argue much pro-learning here because I think it’s self obvious.
It’s not like they owe us effort to get to know the platform, the platform has to be inviting instead.
An inviting platform can be an invitation to a walled garden where somebody else has control and users are more like “useds” - like reddit. So it can be a trap. Especially if you’re the kind of person that has something against learning and doesn’t want to bother with any of that, just wants to use.
Reddit is relatively easy to get started, you can just scroll through a bunch of default subs and get going. That’s not easily replicated here.
Let’s be honest here, it’s very slightly more complex, but I think only the most technically ilitterate can’t create an account and join the subs they want. I mean it’s in plain English, you can ask for help (and it’s already been discussed a lot since the blackout), and it’s 99% like reddit when it comes to the concepts and the interface and everything.
Learning’s good?! Not gonna argue much pro-learning here because I think it’s self obvious.
And that is just arrogance, sorry. If a system is not self explaining while being marketed as a mass medium, it’s simply not a good system. Look at Linux, if that’s more your liking. We’re coming from Ubuntu and now are supposed to install Arch. Sure, possible. But most people simply don’t want that.
I mean it’s in plain English, you can ask for help (and it’s already been discussed a lot since the blackout), and it’s 99% like reddit when it comes to the concepts and the interface and everything.
People don’t want that. Most people don’t give a shit about any of the federation stuff and technical details and they don’t want to ask for help just for some cat pictures.
If you want to appeal to the masses, you have to design an interface for people who don’t care. Simple as that.
To add on to this - computers used to run on DOS commands. What made them mainstream was creating a UI which allowed a layperson to use it. So now a graphic designer can focus on artwork rather than needing to understand computer backend.
Similarly, we’re floating around windows '93 or something.
The way I see - we’re the early adopters who can both see the potential and can also affect real change. We’ll be the ones paving the way for future users. For me, figuring out how software works is like a puzzle to me and I find it fun. However, my sibling would find this site completely unusable because their brain doesn’t find this fun, they find this sort of thing overwhelming and complicated.
I’d love to see a mass migration, but without some more user-friendly tools, it’s going to be us nerdy folks having fun in our new sandbox.
Exactly.
For most people, technology is a tool. I don’t want to learn how to build my own train, I want to get from A to B. If there’s no accessible way to ride trains, I’ll just walk or drive a car.
That doesn’t mean, being nerdy about something is bad, but demanding that kind of commitment from everyone is just ignorant.
Learning is bad actually.
It’s the interface more than the technology.
I’m a new user who’s not all that familiar with federated social media. But, I think if this instance looked and acted as much like Reddit as possible, most new users would be barely aware of federation.
I’ve written it before: instances should be more closely aligned with subreddits.
Currently we basically several Reddits existing side by side, who just happen to use a similar login.
I don’t think it needs to look like Reddit in particular, but everything needs to be more seamless and intuitive for mainstream users. As long as everything just works so they don’t even need to know what it means to be federated then I think it would attract a lot more people.
You probably would appreciate the various tampermonkey user scripts out on greasyfork then https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts?q=lemmy
There’s also [email protected]
I like to think myself as a power users and federations have been confusing in Lemmy and Mastodon for sure.
But in Mastodon more confusing than in Lemmy, I think it’s because the better interface of Lemmy and the ease to interact and follow other instances. I just think is a matter of interface and an well-thought integrated migration process so people could move between instances much easier if needed.
This might be a hot take but…
Is the interface really that terrible? I feel that if it were as easily accessible aa reddit or even facebook then we would be bombarded with so many brain dead posts by users who don’t understand how to get through a computer and therefore the quality of posting and discussion goes way down.
I’m probably wrongly stereotyping and judging here but I had to say it.
The structure of the interface isn’t bad, but I’ve encountered a lot of issues stemming from mistakes as novice as ID collisions. It works on phones, but it doesn’t look great. At best, it keeps itself simple, which is a positive.
It seems like a win but tech-literate is not equal to smart. Let’s say we want advice about cars. Now all the older mechanics who are very smart and technical with cars but not as much with computers won’t bring their expertise here. I really want Lemmy to take off. I think it is a good replacement for the scrolling and time-wasting that Reddit provides but I’m worried it will never be a useful resource the same way Reddit is. I think a lot would need to change for that to happen.
It took me a little bit to wrap my head around the concept, but it’s fairly straight forward. Part of the problem is that when you want to “join lemmy” you’re presented with several dozen instances and it’s unclear what you’re supposed to do. I went through all of the “general lemmy” instances until I found this one which seems to be the most popular. I get that you can access other instances that are federated but that’s not immediately clear to the user.
Right now it will probably be like original Reddit where the user base is mostly tech savvy people.
I remember for years people would look at the interface of Reddit “old reddit” and just not understand it because of its totally utilitarian design. They couldn’t make out the subreddit names being r/asentencelikethis. It kept the mainstream users (or let’s just say less techsavey) out for a long time.
I think lemmy captures that original feeling of being slightly off-putting unless you’re willing to get your head around it.
I generally tell people not to over think it.
Step 1 is to join one of the big instances.
Once they’re in, then talk about browsing cross instances.
If they stay long enough, they’ll figure out favorite instances.
Yeah I can kind of see a Basic vs. Advanced sign-up where the basic flow just auto-suggests a server
I think it can be initially, because it sounds confusing, but I personally feel fairly confident after poking around consistently after a couple of days, that was the amount of time it took for me with reddit all those years ago as well, I believe. Once you figure out how to get to other federations and look up things there, things just run nicely, as long as you’re into the old reddit/old internet forums look. Honestly, I found figuring out cross federations in mastodon is way harder, and they’re doing it.
But I don’t think it will be on the long run to most people once they acclimatise. I’m using both Jerboa and the browser and when I search for new communities to join or look up what’s going on on All neither feels like a confusing alien experience. The only part of it that feels weird about it is that after so many years, I very rarely had a need or a desire to use reddit’s all, so feels a bit odd.
I’ve been thinking about setting up my communities based on what I used to follow on Reddit but honestly, I get about 30 seconds to browse at a time and it’s too much of a mental hurdle to be like ok…I need to go to what site was it? And I need to keep going back to my Reddit subreddit list, then search for every subreddit on [whatever that site was] then go to the app and paste some URL in… All of this is a pain in the arse on mobile and if it’s not the sort of thing I can do in a minute or two then it’s not going to get done.
Maybe someone will write a service that lets you enter your Reddit username and it just auto-searches for the closest matching community for each subreddit you are subscribed to and auto-adds them to your Lemmy account
That’s the same problem anyone would have if they signed up for a new reddit account though
Can’t you just log in to your Lemmy instance and search the communities by clicking the communities button? You just need to look at “all” instead of “local” communities.
Maybe? I thought I read that to search for communities across all instances you have to use some external website that indexed them all (can’t remember the name)
As a new user, what does this mean?
I already signed into an instance and created a user name and password? Do I need to join a unique instance for every community I join? Does everyone just use password managers or something like that?
No, that’s what they’re saying. Don’t do that. Click on the magnifying glass in the top menu, and make sure that the selector that offers [Subscribed, Local, or All], choose All. That’ll include communities on other instances that this instance knows about.
