this post has a really weird tone.
they are making bold demands for the developers of lemmy. if you wanna help and get involved, go get involved. open up issues, get in touch, try to understand. making a big ranty post on reddit is not going to be effective in communicating with the developers. i would have been less bothered by this if they had written it more in the spirit of “my issues with/criticism of lemmy”.
i agree with the sentiment that if it is not convenient or attractive, then you won’t get whole communities to switch services, no matter how good the intentions are and how much one argues on principle.
but so many of the issues people bring up boil down to “there aren’t enough people there, there isn’t enough content”. and with so many people, it feels like they are looking for excuses to not like the less popular and less conventional alternative platform. i get a lot of the criticism, but so many of these comments feel like laziness and cowardliness against trying something new and with a smaller userbase.
a lot of the problems also boil down to federation which is just part of the inherent design of lemmy. i agree with the idea that recommending some canonical homeserver is better than to just tell people to figure it out themselves, and to then be confused by how timelines work. the whole there being
buyfromEUchannels in multiple different servers is just the unfortunate reality that this “movement” or topic is not a specific closed group.i, for one, like the idea of more local scenes, with different UIs. it is like more traditional forums, where you need multiple accounts for different forums. with lemmy, it is similar, but most of the time you only need one account and the forums are more interconnected. when a whole community lives on one specific forum (yes, even today where this is rare), the community is usually happy. and with the rare cases lemmy scenes that are localized in big numbers in one channel, i get the impresssion that people are happy there. the interconnectedness is a nice bonus. but also, i get that
buyfromEUis not that big of a subject to just join a whole new forum for.ultimately, the whole
buyfromEUthing on reddit is a consumerist culture anyway. people want this stuff together with their cat videos. and dankmemes. and their news. and porn (actually, most people use a separate account for this, this would be a pro of federation of lemmy). it is consumerist activism. people want a classical social media experience, and you will just not get that with lemmy.i personally think that the biggest issue is userbase. lemmy with the biggest userbase for a spwcific topic would mean people would have an incentive to go there, and most people who i know who tried lemmy who stuck around for longer than a month, seem to get used to the federation stuff. like, it’s all good once you get your feed together.
people want a classical social media experience, and you will just not get that with lemmy.
Yep, to me the article indicates a fundamental misunderstanding.
They seem to want the same exact Reddit, just somewhere else. The commenters constantly mention “there isn’t a huge userbase” on the fediverse with no consideration of what a mainstream userbase is getting them.
They believe because Reddit (or Facebook, or Twitter, etc.) reached a certain mass, literally all social media has to do the same to be worth considering.
My guess is they’re the late reddit accounts when reddit is already big and shit. They weren’t around when reddit was just “small digg”. Tbf I wasn’t there as well.
I was there when reddit already have comments for posts and remember imgur is the image hosting site for reddit (with no culture and community of its own. Until the reddit file cabinet suddenly gained “sentience”).
I suspect it’s most likely those that cried about lemmy’s “bad UI” only joined after reddit turned into the vomit inducing non chronologically sorted reddit.
Side note I have never browsed r/all ever, but I concede it’s a necessity for the threadiverse. But it’s all just for me to further curate what I want to see. I was never into whatever dogfood sorting spyware algos tried to force down.
Though I admit it took me several tries to understand federation and how it works.
indeed, you make a good point. most of these people didn’t experience reddit when reddit when reddit had “no userbase” compared to other social media.
but reddit was unique, and that is what drew people there. sadly, lemmy does not have that much “uniqueness” to show (being a reddit clone), besides being federated and fully open source.
To me, it kind of does! Lemmy (with copious blocking) comes as close as I’ve ever felt to what Reddit felt like in 2010.
“All” still requires a lot of filtering, but I see interesting stuff every day.
And I came back to read the other person’s comment, and you had replied! The person I replied to, I remembered the username. And it’s a really thoughtful reply! This happens a lot on smaller communities on Reddit as well, but the whole thing used to feel like that.
I see that on the fediverse pretty much every day! It’s always all about the (preferably kind) communities you build around specific things.
I actually think this post has a lot of solid points, many of which I have argued myself in the past. One thing was funny though. He says:
Today’s Reddit is a phone product. The “just use the web UI” crowd is not representative of mainstream behavior.
and then several users in the comments were turned off by the Web UI of Lemmy.
Photon (and similar front ends) are pretty awesome on mobile. If Lemmy developers used it as a base for a new default webUI, it might solve all of the UI complaints.
It doesn’t help that Lemmy’s web UI is different depending on the instance. Personally I find dbzero’s really bad. But they might think that’s the Lemmy web UI and not realise it’s different on each instance.
Of course it’s all subjective but I suspect the people complaining about the UI are likely users that have only known reddits “redesign”, where as the older users will feel more at home on a default, unmodified Lemmy UI.
I disagree that having a variety of UIs is a bad thing. I wouldn’t want every instance to look like dbzero! It also highlights that Lemmy is not a single platform, it’s a federation of them. Heck even reddit has two UIs!
They may not know the phone apps, and if they’re on iOS there may not be any.
How delightfully European Union of them to debate debate debate in the face of a looming crisis.
Yes Lemmy has a lot of improving to do, but I’m not seeing many other alternatives!
The best way to get Lemmy/PieFed to improve is by using it. You can report issues and talk about them here, but talking about them in Reddit is talking to the wrong audience.
I mean, there’s piefed and the *bins, if we’re being pedantic, but especially outside of the fediverse I don’t think the distinction is too important.
Yeah, it also doesn’t address the Concerned™ poster.
If a user taps “subscribe,” store it locally. When they finally create an account, they should be able to “claim” those subscriptions. This is a small UX move that has an outsized effect on conversion.
Any evidence for this? Twitter tried something like this, but then moved to putting everything behind a log in wall so I’m led to believe that the latter has better guest-to-registration statistics.
That’s not even going to be practically possible for people with no account. You could do it for the instance they’re currently browsing from, but the cookie wouldn’t carry to others if they found themselves browsing from another instance as the sort of “front end”. Might be wrong, but that’s how I understand cookies to work.
Then there’s edge cases like them trying to psuedo-subscribe to a community that hasn’t been pulled down to the instance they’re on yet. If you wanted it to work like it does for a real user, that would have to be logged by the instance so it could fetch it. That would be open to a lot of abuse I would think. Unauthenticated visitors could force federation of illegal comms, or effectively anonymously DDOS the instance by overloading it with requests to pull down tons of comms. There’s plenty of ways to conbat that, but it would undeniably break the concepts behind how federation is meant to work (for the sake of storage and server efficiency) if you allowed it to be kicked off by guest users.
So at best it would be a brittle thing, locked to the instance the guest was browsing at the time and restricted to comms already federated with the instance.
Not completely useless, but it would be a hell of a lot of work for so little benefit.
I can’t think of any other site that does that. In fact, if I was using a site like that for a while and then lost all my subscriptions because my cookies got wiped, I might not come back.
There’s also the issue of how you’d tell between a new user and a user with an account on the wrong instance. Imagine how confusing it would be to hit subscribe, see it goes through and when you go to your mobile app it’s not there.
Like it makes sense to me if an app does that. Is that what they could mean with it?
On an actual web browser I agree with you.
