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 😅
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.
Not dumb! We’re all new to this!
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.
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!
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.
You just described my entire journey for my first two days on Lemmy
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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It shouldn’t be a turn off, but it absolutely is right now. Why does federation have to be so visible to the end user? I really don’t get it, things could just be federated mostly behind the scenes. It already goes wrong on the homepage where users are faced with “joining a server” and they get overwhelmed by technical terms like “instances” “fediverse” “lemmyverse”. Then you have to pick a server and one of the first things you potentially see is complicated url’s no one can ever remember and descriptions containing keywords like “piracy”, “NSFW”, “furry” and lots of other stuff most people aren’t interested in. But this already sets the tone of what content there is, which could be good but could also just scary people away pretty quickly.
Then even if a user does decide to go through and pick a server, they need to remember the URL of it. Lots of people still just go to google and type “lemmy”, land on the homepage and see no login button and get completely lost.
And that’s just signing up.
There needs to be a focus on UX, more specifically in getting rid of all that technical jazz for non technical users and in guiding users toward the content they want to see. People aren’t finding the content or are just stuck on a page that doesn’t update for days. All the different server related stuff should be invisible unless you want to see it.
There’s just way too much focus on “federation” that few people actually care about. If you want people of all ages and interests, it’ll have to become a lot simpler.
I mean, all this applies to email, an yet people still use it. And email doesn’t even have an join-email.com that guides users, so I guess lemmy already has a better experience.
I wish we could just stop making a big deal out of the federation, other than choosing an initial home and having perceived duplicate groups it has more or less no impact to the front end users.
It’s a backend thing and we need to bury it more in the UI so people don’t feel it.
Exactly. Make it infrastructure that’s hidden away from the front end. Find some way to wrap up duplicate groups into larger categories or something, and figure out a way to migrate accounts if your home instance tanks. That would cover all my concerns.
Each community on each instance should have at least one required tag when created. There should be a list of tags available. If you make a meme community, you use the meme tag, and it lumps your community in with every other one that has the meme tag, then you can subscribe to a tag and it shows you all posts from all communities in that tag. There should then be a way to hide posts from certain communities within that tag if they start getting stupid. Not sure how viable this is though.
There’s a huge stigma around it. A lot of friction with mastodon. I think they’re working toward meta-communities.
I do have worries about people signing up to smaller nodes and losing all their posts/subs/data when a node shuts down. It would be kinda cool if we had the ability to merge nodes or have a true decentralized login.
One login for the entire fediverse would make sense.
kinddda. you’d still need to do something smart because it needs to be decentralized. IRC handled it with registered nicknames, i’d think we could field something with some form of federated authentication provider, split the data between a few nodes.
Agreed! Then it could be really like email! You create an account on an “account server”, we’ll call it, and then you can use that account to log into “community servers”. Instances wouldn’t need to federate content with each other, since users could just go to other instances with their account.
If you didn’t federate the account servers, noone would want to step and and pay for the service for everyone. The accounts need to be spread as much as the data to protect them, but they need to be redundant as well
I’m not really up on the intricacies of the federation philosophy, but why isn’t it just distributed p2p style?
So there would be 1 forward facing thing that you interact with, but all of the backend functions would be spread across all the volunteer servers/instances. Like torrent seeding.
Maybe that’s not even feasible, but I’ve been wondering since I joined.
I read this message this morning, and pondered this for quite some time. It’s definitely not impossible, but there’s a college thesis worth of conidiations and difficult problems to address. There’s probably already a number of products that would be a better fit than federation.
The torrent system as it is, is ill fit, it’s got the distribute things and protect them with hashes in spades, but unlike forums it doesn’t need to deliver you data in a timely fashion. If that copy of Scooby Do and the Reluctant Werewolf takes a couple of days for someone to come online and have you a few k of content, it’s no big deal. That said, it IS possible to watch really popular videos over BT.
I think the deepest problem is trying to keep the data online. You obvious can’t have a multi-terabyte copy of forums on everyone’s box, people are going to need to split and choose who gets what but they you have to figure out a way to keep everything everywhere online. You can’t just force people to host everything or you’ll end up with unexpected jailbait hosting.
You’d have to sit down for a long time and draw up a spec to even define what your problems are, you’d have to figure out things like, how much of the data do you expect to be available all the time, how many copies do you seed around, how you’d manage to keep people seeding it.
Policing and moderation also becomes a sore subject. Most of the P2P stuff is resilient against removing items by deisgn, it’s immutable once launched. For things like edits, you could do versioning systems, but like if someone was doxxed or someone posted nudes of their ex, there’s no way to remove the old versions.
Authentication and identification would be a nightmare. you’d probably need to digitally sign everything and keep your keys in a chain of custody, signing each new key with the old one.
it’s an awesome thought exercise though.
Wow, thanks for such a detailed reply. I was sitting here thinking something like “just take what the server does and uh… distribute it”, but it’s clearly not trivial.
IMO, everybody tries to explain what fediverse is, instances are, how they work, so on, and so forth. That’s what is pushing people away. Just point them to one place. Lemmy.world seems to have the least friction to signup (no approval, only email confirmation), while also hosting a lot of communities. Just tell people to signup on lemmy.world, and search for whatever communities they want to join, and subscribe to the one with most subscribers. That should be enough. No need to ‘educate’ them on how fediverse works.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, it will absolutely be a barrier to entry to many. Especially people who never used discussion boards. Before reddit, I was an active member on a dozen or so boards, and always wished there was a simpler way for them to interact. So, Lemmy makes sense to me.
If lemmy every becomes mainstream the implementation details will be completely lost to people, and that’s ok. You can try explaining someone what a web browser is, but people will still say “I opened google” or even “I opened internet” instead of “I opened chrome”. With lemmy there will probably be a few huge instances that people just gravitate to, and if/when something goes wrong, communities will have to migrate, and users will have to try to get into a new instance.
That’s what happened with email. Back in the day it was basically just institutions and very geeky people with basement servers who had an email address (and before that, government). For it to hit mainstream, large, for-profit corporations, had to set up mail servers and make it easy to get in and use it. Nowadays people just use their browser or outlook or Gmail app without even knowing what an SMTP server is. If the fediverse evolved that way, I hope by then there are a lot of communities that have taken root in community-owned instances, otherwise power just gets reconcentrated to a few big players again.
I already can imagine some people talking to their tech savy friend and telling them
fediwhat? I don’t want any of that. I will stay and use lemmy.world
It’s like old bar names from when people did not know how to read, I don’t know what that fediverse and lemmy stuff is, I just go to the white monkey.
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.
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’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 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 !plugins@sh.itjust.works
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.
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 think it will … if I look at my own use-cases for sites like this, it’s connecting with people over shared interests (rather than instances) or scrolling memes. I don’t see how any of these use cases benefit from federation (from the user perspective). The looming threat of information disappearing due to defederation, the confusion about instances, etc … that’s off-putting even to tech-savvy users.
Also ultimately I find it questionable from a philosophical perspective. Why should it matter which instance is your “home” instance, unless that’s specifically the way of interaction you’re looking for?
Again, for me it’s interests over instances, and I think the federation aspect is just an additional layer that doesn’t add any value.
I mean, it sounds confusing, but it’s also why all this works… So I mean, who cares? Baby meet bathwater, etc.
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 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.
