You may find nothing wrong with the user interface, but I’m not you and I see plenty wrong with it. I’m not the only one with this opinion, as evidenced by a number of github bug requests, a near constant stream of questions in support communities on these websites, all of the votes my comment is receiving, and well, just asking like 10 random people what they think. I would encourage you to try to put yourself in other people’s shoes - if you’re struggling with that, simply ask them how they feel and listen to what they have to say.
Oh it’s absolutely full of UX bugs, for sure. It took me a week to sign up, because of a user interface bug. But those are all clearly just bugs, they’re not a design problem.
Lemmy needs a lot of work, but it’s an excellent foundation, at least from a design perspective.
From a design perspective it still has a lot of friction on signups though, we’re asking users to make a server choice before they even remotely understand what that entails. That simple decision made me spend a week understanding the fediverse before settling on Lemm.ee, but the average user won’t do that, they’ll get confused and then leave.
From a more traditional UX standpoint the general feed is also fairly bad, reddit has built in feeds for the things people care the most about (trending and subscribed) that pop up by default when opening the app or website, and gives the advanced controls off to the side. Lemmy on the other hand defaults to a feed that shows basically nothing, and only gives the advanced controls to fix it. For a new user that isn’t tech savvy, the fact that the feed defaults to local is enough to make Lemmy seem completely dead if they happened to join a small instance.
These aren’t major issues for us, but they are major issues for widespread adoption. It needs to be so easy that you can use it accidentally, and the UX isn’t there yet. I’m sure we can fix issues with the feed and the app, but I do worry that the server choice problem isn’t going to get a good solution
You may find nothing wrong with the user interface, but I’m not you and I see plenty wrong with it. I’m not the only one with this opinion, as evidenced by a number of github bug requests, a near constant stream of questions in support communities on these websites, all of the votes my comment is receiving, and well, just asking like 10 random people what they think. I would encourage you to try to put yourself in other people’s shoes - if you’re struggling with that, simply ask them how they feel and listen to what they have to say.
Oh it’s absolutely full of UX bugs, for sure. It took me a week to sign up, because of a user interface bug. But those are all clearly just bugs, they’re not a design problem.
Lemmy needs a lot of work, but it’s an excellent foundation, at least from a design perspective.
From a design perspective it still has a lot of friction on signups though, we’re asking users to make a server choice before they even remotely understand what that entails. That simple decision made me spend a week understanding the fediverse before settling on Lemm.ee, but the average user won’t do that, they’ll get confused and then leave.
From a more traditional UX standpoint the general feed is also fairly bad, reddit has built in feeds for the things people care the most about (trending and subscribed) that pop up by default when opening the app or website, and gives the advanced controls off to the side. Lemmy on the other hand defaults to a feed that shows basically nothing, and only gives the advanced controls to fix it. For a new user that isn’t tech savvy, the fact that the feed defaults to local is enough to make Lemmy seem completely dead if they happened to join a small instance.
These aren’t major issues for us, but they are major issues for widespread adoption. It needs to be so easy that you can use it accidentally, and the UX isn’t there yet. I’m sure we can fix issues with the feed and the app, but I do worry that the server choice problem isn’t going to get a good solution