There have been various posts here in the last days describing how difficult it is for new people to start using Lemmy. In fact they are absolutely correct, it is much easier to get started on Reddit. But what many forget is that Lemmy is not a corporation employing dozens of full-time designers, running A/B-tests and so on. Lemmy is an open source project run by volunteers, with only @dessalines and me working on it full-time. Neither of us is a particularly good designer, and our time is mainly spent working on the backend (database, federation, api), and preparing the upcoming 1.0 release.

If you see anything on join-lemmy.org or in the Lemmy UI itself that could be improved, the best option is to make that improvement yourself. Both of them use standard web technologies (nodejs, tailwindcss, inferno etc). The userbase here is quite technical so there are many of you able to contribute. We rarely reject any pull requests as long as they make a real improvement. Though it usually requires a little back and forth to review the changes and then address the review comments.

You can find the source code for join-lemmy.org here and follow development instructions in the readme. Regarding the default Lemmy UI go here and read the documentation with development instructions. If you are not a developer you can still help, for example by improving the documentation. Additionally you can make changes to the texts for joinlemmy and lemmy-ui.

All this said, there have also been some suggestions to make onboarding easier by directing new users to a hardcoded default instance. This may sound like a good idea at first but won’t work well in practice. Running such an instance would take significant time for administration and moderation, but we maintainers are already too busy. Besides it would be impossible to reach an agreement who this default instance should federate with or how exactly it should be moderated. So if you want to get nontechnical users to Lemmy, the solution is to link them directly to a specific instance based on their interests.

  • Rowan Thorpe@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    6 days ago

    In terms of the “default instance” suggestion, I have an interesting hybrid suggestion. What about having an “easy on-ramp” instance where you get registered for one month with a hard-exit (auto-migrate to other instance, perhaps using some kind of federated-auth/token system for the migration, and forced password-setup on first use of the new instance). At any point during on-ramp the user could configure destination-instance from a list in the settings (or configure auto-export for manual import to any other “auto-migrate-unsupported” instance), with optional early-migration if the user has decided before the end of the month. Optionally a recommendation engine could iteratively curate a list of suggested instances based on usage during on-ramp (admins of those instances could provide - limited number of - tags of their choosing for the engine to use for matching). That part could be opt-in because probably a lot of users would find it creepy. The UX would need to be very user-friendly “pointy clicky” because that would be the overwhelming target demographic of such an instance. I think “on-boarding and educating” is better than “gatekeeping” (which feels like the “if you need to ask the price you can’t afford it” shopping trope). A nice side-effect is it already painlessly introduces users to the killer-feature “easy migration” between instances due to data-portability.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      That would take a significant amount of work to implement, and we dont have the resources for it. But all the code is open source, so youre welcome to give it a try yourself.

  • .Donuts@lemmy.worldEnglish
    119·
    8 days ago

    The userbase here is quite technical so there are many of you able to contribute.

    As a project manager, I can help by ballooning the scope and setting the deadline to yesterday! Doing my part!

  • Kyrgizion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    635·
    8 days ago

    I don’t really agree that it’s much easier to start on Reddit. Especially nowadays.

    -Post from an IP that was once used by a banned account? Also banned (after first being shadowbanned)

    -Try to post in any niche sub of your choosing after making an account? Forget it, wait three weeks and farm 3K karma first (which encourages shitposting and reposting, lowering quality)

    -Deviate a fraction of an inch from whatever sub’s 500-page rulebook? Banned.

    -Try to argue an unbanning? That’s a permanent mute.

    -Post anything - and I do mean anything - in a “wrong” sub, get immediately permabanned by a slew of subs you didn’t even know existed.

    -Some mod doesn’t agree with something you posted? Even if it was 5 years ago in a sub that has since been deleted? Banned and muted.

    Reddit is an absolutely terrible experience for new posters. How they even manage to retain a tenth of them is beyond me. I encourage them to keep it up however, more traffic for Lemmy.

    • Resubscribe@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Another to add: Caught an IP ban for “report abuse” after reporting several bigots. Couldn’t have been more than 5. No warning or previous infractions, just straight up IP banned. Appealing did nothing, of course. Eventually just stopped caring.

      Saw quite a few people saying they had the same thing happen. The general consensus of those threads was just not to report *anything *anymore…

    • Tiger@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      14·
      8 days ago

      Here’s another for your list:

      • Use a VPN? Blocked from accessing it. (I try to get info from internet searches sometimes and they block me, I have to use a VPN because am in China.)
      • fangleone2526@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        8 days ago

        This is only if you aren’t logged in. If you login to reddit you can use a VPN fine. It is still so incredibly annoying though.

  • AnonomousWolf@lemm.eeEnglish
    471·
    8 days ago

    I’m the OP of one of the posts that blew up about UX.

    This is great news, I will look into building something like join-lemmy/onboarding that could guide users, or improving join-lemmy

  • Peasley@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    8 days ago

    Also remember to be nice. I see heated arguments regressing into ad hominems by the third comment pretty regularly. We can be better than Reddit

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      8 days ago

      You and you being so nice made me switch to ad hominem faster than usual! How the person like you can be so terribly pleasant? Treat yourself, you fellow lemming.

  • abobla@lemm.eeEnglish
    28·
    8 days ago

    I can confirm. These guys are very open to pull requests that improve the platform.

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.alEnglish
    26·
    8 days ago

    All this said, there have also been some suggestions to make onboarding easier by directing new users to a hardcoded default instance. This may sound like a good idea at first but won’t work well in practice. Running such an instance would take significant time for administration and moderation, but we maintainers are already too busy. Besides it would be impossible to reach an agreement who this default instance should federate with or how exactly it should be moderated. So if you want to get nontechnical users to Lemmy, the solution is to link them directly to a specific instance based on their interests.

    Wholeheartedly agree with this. Also people should get use to taking responsibility for their online experiences. Corporations have made people stupid to the point they reject autonomy.

  • fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    26·
    8 days ago

    I don’t have much to say, but thank you for working on lemmy all these years.

    I can complain about it a lot sometimes, but I’m very grateful for both the communities and the developers that kickstarted the fediverse, and for free too! So, thank you ❤️

    If you or other people want to discuss the development of fedisoftware for beginners, or just growing as a whole you and everyone else are more than welcome at !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com!

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      17·
      8 days ago

      I do, although the sections in Mordor are a bit tedious to get through. But its worth it for all the details that were left out of the movies.

        • nutomic@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          7·
          8 days ago

          I definitely plan to read the Silmarillion, because the history of middle earth sounds so interesting.

          • serfraser@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            5·
            8 days ago

            It’s worth it! I only read it last year and it gave me a whole new level of appreciation for the other stories.

            • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2·
              8 days ago

              Once you’ve read the Silmarillion, there’s also The Children of Húrin. If you start from the Hobbit > LOTR > Silmarillion > CoH, it’s basically a steady progression of increasing epicness and tragedy.

              I suppose the Silmarillion is the most epic, but Children of Húrin is the most intensely tragic.

  • d00phy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    244·
    8 days ago

    This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the effort to make joining Lemmy easier has some downsides. One of the nicest things about these communities is how easy it is to have good conversations with internet strangers. I’ve grown to appreciate and hope for Lemmy not trying to be a Reddit replacement. In fact, I’m totally fine with “the masses” staying in Spez’s data harvesting machine. If, one day, Lemmy gets as popular as Reddit, I think it will inevitably have many of the same problems. It just theoretically won’t be selling your data for profit (one hopes, anyway). My wife isn’t super-techy, and I explained the concept of Lemmy to my wife in about 10 minutes. She set up an account in about 5.

    To me, it’s not that using or joining Lemmy is hard. It’s that a lot of people have come to loathe change. They’re told that Lemmy is “like Reddit,” so why leave Reddit, all their accumulated Internet points, and their familiar communities/echo chambers? Pretty much all of them also use other data-harvesting social media sites, so they mostly don’t care about that aspect. When I tell my friends about Lemmy I talk about how the size of the communities is really conducive to good conversations from wide enough ranges of opinions and experiences, compared to Reddit’s too much of everything including trolls.

    • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      22·
      8 days ago

      I agree with the general feeling, but we could probably have a bit more activity while still keeping that feeling.

      100k monthly active users would allow most of the communities promoted on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca to have more than one or two regular posters

    • d00phy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      8 days ago

      Forgot to add that I’m not saying Lemmy is perfect as is. For sure there are things that can be improved and tweaked. And by all means, people who want to contribute should be encouraged and applauded. I’m just saying that the community that’s grown here is pretty great, and growth coming from slow-ish trickle of new users probably wouldn’t threaten that. Right now, Lemmy has a good late-90s, early 00s community feeling, and I really enjoy it.

    • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago

      One of the nicest things about these communities is how easy it is to have good conversations with internet strangers.

      Maybe at that point people would use the Local feed more when they want to interact with their neighbors?

  • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.worldEnglish
    20·
    8 days ago

    My proposal have been a little more complicated, but IMO works well for a BFU:

    • create some set of rules for “default instances” - every instance that wants to be in the list must follow them and will be periodically checked
      • I don’t have any particular rules in mind, but some examples might include active moderation team, obviously registrations being open and if you really want to make it easy, either no application question or having it automatically approved by an automod of some kind
    • on join-lemmy, present a registration form that will create an account on a randomly selected instance from the pool and redirect there afterwards
    • there should be a link somewhere for “experts” where you could link to the current wizard

    I’m willing to work on this if we can sit down and agree on the criteria for the pool. I can also ask my UX guy to help a little.

    Feel free to text me here or on Matrix if this is something you think is worth pursuing. I’d also appreciate if you let me know it’s not the direction you want to go in.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      91·
      8 days ago

      I would call them “starter” instances. And I’m in agreement there should be a set of principles that these instances should follow but at the same time telling new users that it’s okay to switch instances. I started in .world but moved due to their increasingly conservative changes.

      While I personally would steer new users away from .world, I think it’s more important to tell them it’s okay to switch instances.

    • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      73·
      8 days ago

      I don’t have any particular rules in mind, but some examples might include active moderation team, obviously registrations being open and if you really want to make it easy, either no application question or having it automatically approved by an automod of some kind

      Hexbear meets those requirements, which rule would you add to exclude them? Back in the day, exploding heads would fit them too

      • ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        8 days ago

        maybe they should need to maintain a certain percentage of high pop instances that federate with them. Basically establishing a standard of trust.

        “At least 80% of instances with over 1,000 active users must federate with you to be a Lemmy starter instance.”

        This guarantees that new users will see the majority of content, and the starter instances won’t be embroiled in federation wars. The % value and pop numbers can change to reduce it down to a manageable number of starter instances.

      • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.worldEnglish
        5·
        8 days ago

        That was just rules to make it work on the technical side - you’re not helping the user experience if you have to wait half a day until someone manually approves your registration.

        The rest would need to be discussed and actually thought out (and agreed upon with Lemmy devs, who own the join-lemmy domain).

        I haven’t given it much thought because I see no point if it never gets implemented.

      • Grimy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        8 days ago

        Cooking up global fediverse rules specifically meant to try and exclude an instance is crossing the line imo. If you don’t like interacting with them, join one of the many instances that have already blocked them.

        This kind of crusade goes against the spirit of the fediverse imo.

          • turtle [he/him]@lemm.eeEnglish
            4·
            8 days ago

            As long as it’s clearly labeled as something like “a communist instance”, why not? Some potential Lemmy users would probably feel right at home there. It doesn’t even have to be a controversial label, just a factual description that the Lemmygrad people would agree with.

            • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              4·
              8 days ago

              In that case I agree. The issue I see is people saying “just give new joiners a random instance across the top 20”, denying the unique culture of a few of them

              • turtle [he/him]@lemm.eeEnglish
                5·
                8 days ago

                Ah, yes, that makes sense now! If it is an automatic, random server selection, then I also agree that it should be only generic, non-controversial instances that are selected.

        • ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          8 days ago

          These aren’t global fediverse rules, they’re constraints meant to apply specifically to the new user experience on Lemmy only.

    • turtle [he/him]@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      8 days ago

      create some set of rules for “default instances” - every instance that wants to be in the list must follow them and will be periodically checked

      I don’t have any particular rules in mind, but some examples might include active moderation team, obviously registrations being open and if you really want to make it easy, either no application question or having it automatically approved by an automod of some kind

      The Mastodon Server Covenant is pretty much what you describe here, and could be used as a starting point: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant

  • lgsp@feddit.it@feddit.itEnglish
    182·
    8 days ago

    I don’t think that Reddit is so much better. The interface at the moment is full of ads that make i confusing. The only thing is the community search that is a bit cumbersome, but this is due to federation, and understood. On the other hand the federation with Mastodon/Friendica/whatever is super-powerful, hand honestly enjoyable

    Thank you for all your work