As an old, I just realized why the time I spend on Lemmy is less soul-destroying than equivalent time on Reddit.
I enjoy searching for topics of interest more than being spoonfed content. So in this respect, the difficulty of Lemmy is the point.
I get it that this is an aging hipster point of view, so really we are fighting for the soul of Lemmy.
How much appeal do we really want?
How fast do we want to grow?
What order should major features be implemented in? (Let alone the debate over which features.)
This debate will never end. Get used to the defederation wars. It is akin to “Am I my brother’s keeper”? This is among the first questions asked in Genesis and God declined to answer. We will fight about it till the end of time.
My best hope is that enough quality instances host quality communities that I can curate my own experience to make so-called social media serve me, not a tech company.
This is a feature, not a bug. Yes you need the instance as well as the community name. This is akin to complaining that you can’t type in a URL without including the TLD (*.com, *.org, *.wtevs).
I am open to an explanation how you can expect to find a community without both pieces of information. There may be a less confusing way to structure the links, but the community name and instance name are basically required for a federated system.
I don't like all the communities that moved from Reddit that are just using bots to cross post shit from Reddit to here. All those communities seem to have are the bot posts. I'm not commenting to a bot; it won't respond. I don't know how many humans would see it, because literally no content is posted by a human. I post my own content, but then it's buried by the bot spamming stolen content.
I get the idea was to seed the community and make it appear active, but it just has the opposite effect. If I was to block the bot as I usually do because I don't care to engage with bot content, that community would be dead. At the very least, hide the fact it's a bot and make me believe it's a human I'm talking to.
I want the app to open to frontpage, aka only the communities I subscribed to, sorted by New. I want it to take zero clicks to get here; I just want to open the app and have it there.
Apps are updating rapidly of course, but the last time I went through the main Lemmy apps on Android, the best one still took two clicks to get to my preferred view every time I close and relaunched the app.
Wow. All the top comments are about finding / joining / onboarding.
It's just super unattractive to join.
Discovering communities is easily the #1 complaint
Onboarding is unclear for people
I genuinely don't understand this criticism about the fediverse. It seems like people just want to be told what to do. I totally understand that this isn't a vertical platform like Reddit or Twitter but that doesn't prevent anyone from participating in the platform. It just means that you need to look for what you're interested in rather than be told what you should be interested in.
Multiple communities with the same theme in diverse servers mean lots of repeated information in my home page.
I've commented recently about the redundancy of communities - which I think is a related criticism to knowing what community to join (as opposed to instance). If I'm on this instance but another instance has a community of the same name, which should I join? Both? Meh. It's not something to stand in the way of using the platform at all but it is a bit annoying.
Anyway, my one "complaint" is just that the niche communities I'm a member of on Reddit don't exist here. Specifically, communities for buying and trading things like r/photomarket.
This is still a relatively new platform. It's going to take some time for it to build itself organically. It feels to me that a measurable amount of content on the platform is critiquing the platform. I think it would be more conducive if we all spent less time critiquing and more time generating original content - not stuff cross-posted from other platforms. I mean, in general, if you're searching the web for "a thing", the results aren't going to direct you to the fediverse unless you're specifically searching about something regarding the fediverse. Showing up in search results might be the tipping point that drives more users to join the platform.
Loads more unnecessary and weird political comments on completely unrelated posts. On Reddit it depended much more on the subreddit whether you'll get those weird comments, on Lemmy I found lots of comments up high on various non-political communities which just repeat certain political combat slogans on many posts.
Even when I sympathize with 'that side' moreso than the opposite one, it's just dumb and annoying to me.
The "front page" of lemmy, either the local of the instance you're on or the "all", is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I'm not sure what the issue is with lemmy's front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?
It's too bad because the "front page" is the user's first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.
In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.
The front page of Reddit is one of the places I’ve actively avoided. That’s the place where I’ll find everything that the rest of the world likes to see, but none of the stuff that I care about. I tend to be interested in strange niche topics, and my multireddits reflected that quite clearly. To me, the front page of Lemmy is about as boring as the front page of Reddit, so no big changes there.
That's not really what I was referring to. Sure it selects posts automatically but it's not like it picks what it thinks a specific user is going to click on.
Its just super unattractive to join. If I am thinking about joining a platform I want to know if there is content that is interesting to me. Now if I go to https://join-lemmy.org/ what do I see? It greets me with explanations of the Licensing, tells me all the programming languages and frameworks, shows me pictures of code and something about mod tools and of course immediately offers me to run my own server. None of that is even remotely interesting to me even now that I am a registered user. Not to mention that the design is questionable.
Then it says "Join a server". I am not here to join a server, I am here to join a platform. And if I click on that I am met with about 50 different instances, of which I have no idea what to choose and what implications my choice has.
The whole federation thing, the design, everything is just unintuitive and unattractive to join.
I agree that it is unclear to folks that Lemmy is not a platform and this causes frustration and disappointment for new users. It probably should be clearer on join-lemmy.org that this whole thing is just a bunch of servers talking to each other.
Links between instances often don't work as intended, and there's no good way to redirect me from some-other-instance.pub/c/cool-community to my-instance.pub/c/cool-community@some-other-instance.pub automatically.
There shouldn’t be votes. Activitypub itself shouldn’t have votes but I can understand the broader community around it wanting them to kludge in functionality of places they’re trying to ape.
If you’re coming from Reddit or wherever though and don’t see this as a perfect opportunity to get rid of the part of the site all the problems stem from or are enabled by, I don’t know what to say.
Do you think the issues with voting (Samey content, lowkey groupthink, manipulation, etc) are acceptable if there was some technical solution to vote anonymity?
its not the only cause but its absolutley why reddit ended up so uniquely bad in those ways. the problems were systemic and voting was a big part of that system.
think on it, you got slashdot, then digg, then reddit. they all try to run with this new method of handling both content and discussion: ranked instead of threaded. slashdot falls apart because digg does it better. digg falls apart because it has the method right, but it's trying to be legitimate news. reddit gets huge because it recognizes the ranked model is for social media as opposed to news and leans into it with all the bells and whistles. idk if reddit falls apart.
the canaries leave reddit for the fediverse and start lemmy. but why keep the things that made reddit bad?
In my opinion, the problems you mentioned are not caused by the voting system.
Groupthink is caused by a lack of discipline. Obvious hot takes or otherwise poorly formulated comments should be downvoted. Well presented contrarian opinions should be upvoted. Perhaps educating users on using the system in its intended way – promoting healthy debate or interesting insight – is better than removing the system completely.
Manipulation is caused by poor bot control, so while removing voting might help somewhat, this would be a band-aid at most. Unless you mean some sort of psyop manipulation that doesn't involve automation, which voting can, in theory at least, help against by refuting attempts at manipulation.
Duplicated content I have only seen in connection to the nature of the fediverse so far (i.e., same topic communities spread across multiple large instances). I guess some people would try to farm internet points by posting low quality content, but if people like that content and vote for it, what's there to be done apart from blocking the community you don't like?
Also Lemmy's popularity would suffer if it was missing one of the key features of Reddit ("Full vote scores (+/-) like old Reddit." is listed as one of the main features on the official website).
To me, all the complaints in this thread are a great filter. It keeps away all the people that are too lazy and/or incapable to figure out basic things, which are not the people I want to interact with online anyway
"It's a good filter" is often just an excuse to not improve the UX. You hear this way more from open-source technically-inclined folks than you do from folks who care about building a product that people want to use.
Honestly I don't think the UX is bad. Sure, a few things could be improved, but it's in a great overall state, especially considering its current growth rate
It has sort of been said already, but I didn't find a reply stating my exact criticism so I'll chime in. Lemmy and the fediverse is confusing. Instances, federation, de-federating, and all the other techno-garble is not something most internet users have any frame of reference for and I imagine it is very off-putting to a vast majority of potential users.
I'm not usually one to harp on user experience but it's just a mess trying to get into this whole thing. I was driven by a hatred for reddit to figure it out and I'm a software developer by trade, but still was scratching my head at wtf all these terms were and how it all works. Lemmy and the fediverse desperately needs some onboarding/marketing work and to ditch this sentiment of "if you can't figure it out then we don't want you here."
I do want to mention that despite what I said above, I think apps are doing a good job at making exploration kinda easier. Been digging wefwef/voyager and looking forward to Boost and Sync to check out.
The redditors are really racist and really anticommunist sometimes. I get that the admin wants a diversity of opinion but the orientalism feels pretty intense nowadays
44 Comments
meyotch@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 3y
As an old, I just realized why the time I spend on Lemmy is less soul-destroying than equivalent time on Reddit.
I enjoy searching for topics of interest more than being spoonfed content. So in this respect, the difficulty of Lemmy is the point.
I get it that this is an aging hipster point of view, so really we are fighting for the soul of Lemmy.
How much appeal do we really want?
How fast do we want to grow?
What order should major features be implemented in? (Let alone the debate over which features.)
This debate will never end. Get used to the defederation wars. It is akin to “Am I my brother’s keeper”? This is among the first questions asked in Genesis and God declined to answer. We will fight about it till the end of time.
My best hope is that enough quality instances host quality communities that I can curate my own experience to make so-called social media serve me, not a tech company.
I thought that was the point?
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 3y
Join us at lemmy.world/c/tinnedseafood! Or is it !tinnedseafood. But don’t I need the instance too? This is part of the problem!
meyotch@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 3y
This is a feature, not a bug. Yes you need the instance as well as the community name. This is akin to complaining that you can’t type in a URL without including the TLD (*.com, *.org, *.wtevs).
I am open to an explanation how you can expect to find a community without both pieces of information. There may be a less confusing way to structure the links, but the community name and instance name are basically required for a federated system.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net · 1 pts · 3y
I don't like all the communities that moved from Reddit that are just using bots to cross post shit from Reddit to here. All those communities seem to have are the bot posts. I'm not commenting to a bot; it won't respond. I don't know how many humans would see it, because literally no content is posted by a human. I post my own content, but then it's buried by the bot spamming stolen content.
I get the idea was to seed the community and make it appear active, but it just has the opposite effect. If I was to block the bot as I usually do because I don't care to engage with bot content, that community would be dead. At the very least, hide the fact it's a bot and make me believe it's a human I'm talking to.
SHamblingSHapes@lemmy.one · 1 pts · 3y
I want the app to open to frontpage, aka only the communities I subscribed to, sorted by New. I want it to take zero clicks to get here; I just want to open the app and have it there.
Apps are updating rapidly of course, but the last time I went through the main Lemmy apps on Android, the best one still took two clicks to get to my preferred view every time I close and relaunched the app.
counselwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 3y
You cn do this by changing your account settings.
oxjox@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 3y
Wow. All the top comments are about finding / joining / onboarding.
I genuinely don't understand this criticism about the fediverse. It seems like people just want to be told what to do. I totally understand that this isn't a vertical platform like Reddit or Twitter but that doesn't prevent anyone from participating in the platform. It just means that you need to look for what you're interested in rather than be told what you should be interested in.
I've commented recently about the redundancy of communities - which I think is a related criticism to knowing what community to join (as opposed to instance). If I'm on this instance but another instance has a community of the same name, which should I join? Both? Meh. It's not something to stand in the way of using the platform at all but it is a bit annoying.
Anyway, my one "complaint" is just that the niche communities I'm a member of on Reddit don't exist here. Specifically, communities for buying and trading things like r/photomarket.
This is still a relatively new platform. It's going to take some time for it to build itself organically. It feels to me that a measurable amount of content on the platform is critiquing the platform. I think it would be more conducive if we all spent less time critiquing and more time generating original content - not stuff cross-posted from other platforms. I mean, in general, if you're searching the web for "a thing", the results aren't going to direct you to the fediverse unless you're specifically searching about something regarding the fediverse. Showing up in search results might be the tipping point that drives more users to join the platform.
notTheGirlFromReddit@feddit.de · 1 pts · 3y
Loads more unnecessary and weird political comments on completely unrelated posts. On Reddit it depended much more on the subreddit whether you'll get those weird comments, on Lemmy I found lots of comments up high on various non-political communities which just repeat certain political combat slogans on many posts.
Even when I sympathize with 'that side' moreso than the opposite one, it's just dumb and annoying to me.
Goodie@lemm.ee · 1 pts · 3y
As a general rule, the onboarding and discovery in the fediverse is pretty bloody terrible.
fresh@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 3y
The "front page" of lemmy, either the local of the instance you're on or the "all", is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I'm not sure what the issue is with lemmy's front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?
It's too bad because the "front page" is the user's first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.
In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 3y
The front page of Reddit is one of the places I’ve actively avoided. That’s the place where I’ll find everything that the rest of the world likes to see, but none of the stuff that I care about. I tend to be interested in strange niche topics, and my multireddits reflected that quite clearly. To me, the front page of Lemmy is about as boring as the front page of Reddit, so no big changes there.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.ml · 0 pts · 3y
Some sorting would be good. I'd also like to be able to hide posts without having to block the poster. Right now there is very little user control.
cmat273@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 3y
Lemmy has no algorithm.
nave@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 3y
cmat273@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 3y
That's not really what I was referring to. Sure it selects posts automatically but it's not like it picks what it thinks a specific user is going to click on.
nave@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 3y
Rayleigh@feddit.de · 0 pts · 3y
Its just super unattractive to join. If I am thinking about joining a platform I want to know if there is content that is interesting to me. Now if I go to https://join-lemmy.org/ what do I see? It greets me with explanations of the Licensing, tells me all the programming languages and frameworks, shows me pictures of code and something about mod tools and of course immediately offers me to run my own server. None of that is even remotely interesting to me even now that I am a registered user. Not to mention that the design is questionable. Then it says "Join a server". I am not here to join a server, I am here to join a platform. And if I click on that I am met with about 50 different instances, of which I have no idea what to choose and what implications my choice has.
The whole federation thing, the design, everything is just unintuitive and unattractive to join.
Aviandelight@mander.xyz · 1 pts · 3y
I agree that it is unclear to folks that Lemmy is not a platform and this causes frustration and disappointment for new users. It probably should be clearer on join-lemmy.org that this whole thing is just a bunch of servers talking to each other.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 3y
It's absolutely a platform, it's just not centralized.
mplewis@lemmy.globe.pub · 0 pts · 3y
Links between instances often don't work as intended, and there's no good way to redirect me from
some-other-instance.pub/c/cool-communitytomy-instance.pub/c/cool-community@some-other-instance.pubautomatically.randint@feddit.nl · 0 pts · 3y
You should check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fediredirect/. This works for redirecting both communities and posts, although the latter requires to give your log in credentials to the extension.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 3y
Looks nice. Some us browse on mobile though.
randint@feddit.nl · 1 pts · 3y
I also mainly browse on mobile haha. However loading posts from my home instance is often taken care of by the app (client).
bloodfart@lemmy.ml · -1 pts · 3y
There shouldn’t be votes. Activitypub itself shouldn’t have votes but I can understand the broader community around it wanting them to kludge in functionality of places they’re trying to ape.
If you’re coming from Reddit or wherever though and don’t see this as a perfect opportunity to get rid of the part of the site all the problems stem from or are enabled by, I don’t know what to say.
Get rid of the votes.
salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social · 1 pts · 3y
IMHO, It's fine as long as there's no account wide Reddit-style karma.
bloodfart@lemmy.ml · -1 pts · 3y
Is it fine the way it’s implemented, with no vote anonymity?
salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social · 0 pts · 3y
No, I don't think so, but that's a different aspect.
bloodfart@lemmy.ml · -1 pts · 3y
Do you think the issues with voting (Samey content, lowkey groupthink, manipulation, etc) are acceptable if there was some technical solution to vote anonymity?
salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social · 0 pts · 3y
Are you sure the issues you mentioned are caused by voting? I'm not certain, so I cannot answer your question.
bloodfart@lemmy.ml · -1 pts · 3y
I without a doubt am.
its not the only cause but its absolutley why reddit ended up so uniquely bad in those ways. the problems were systemic and voting was a big part of that system.
think on it, you got slashdot, then digg, then reddit. they all try to run with this new method of handling both content and discussion: ranked instead of threaded. slashdot falls apart because digg does it better. digg falls apart because it has the method right, but it's trying to be legitimate news. reddit gets huge because it recognizes the ranked model is for social media as opposed to news and leans into it with all the bells and whistles. idk if reddit falls apart.
the canaries leave reddit for the fediverse and start lemmy. but why keep the things that made reddit bad?
salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social · 0 pts · 3y
In my opinion, the problems you mentioned are not caused by the voting system.
Groupthink is caused by a lack of discipline. Obvious hot takes or otherwise poorly formulated comments should be downvoted. Well presented contrarian opinions should be upvoted. Perhaps educating users on using the system in its intended way – promoting healthy debate or interesting insight – is better than removing the system completely.
Manipulation is caused by poor bot control, so while removing voting might help somewhat, this would be a band-aid at most. Unless you mean some sort of psyop manipulation that doesn't involve automation, which voting can, in theory at least, help against by refuting attempts at manipulation.
Duplicated content I have only seen in connection to the nature of the fediverse so far (i.e., same topic communities spread across multiple large instances). I guess some people would try to farm internet points by posting low quality content, but if people like that content and vote for it, what's there to be done apart from blocking the community you don't like?
Also Lemmy's popularity would suffer if it was missing one of the key features of Reddit ("Full vote scores (+/-) like old Reddit." is listed as one of the main features on the official website).
Sigmatics@lemmy.ca · -1 pts · 3y
To me, all the complaints in this thread are a great filter. It keeps away all the people that are too lazy and/or incapable to figure out basic things, which are not the people I want to interact with online anyway
mplewis@lemmy.globe.pub · 1 pts · 3y
"It's a good filter" is often just an excuse to not improve the UX. You hear this way more from open-source technically-inclined folks than you do from folks who care about building a product that people want to use.
Sigmatics@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 3y
Honestly I don't think the UX is bad. Sure, a few things could be improved, but it's in a great overall state, especially considering its current growth rate
makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 3y
My tech self surprised me, as I agree.
However, my art self is sad. I'm sure the art community will take a long time to figure out Lemmy.
saloe@lemmy.ml · -1 pts · 3y
It has sort of been said already, but I didn't find a reply stating my exact criticism so I'll chime in. Lemmy and the fediverse is confusing. Instances, federation, de-federating, and all the other techno-garble is not something most internet users have any frame of reference for and I imagine it is very off-putting to a vast majority of potential users.
I'm not usually one to harp on user experience but it's just a mess trying to get into this whole thing. I was driven by a hatred for reddit to figure it out and I'm a software developer by trade, but still was scratching my head at wtf all these terms were and how it all works. Lemmy and the fediverse desperately needs some onboarding/marketing work and to ditch this sentiment of "if you can't figure it out then we don't want you here."
ritz@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 3y
I do want to mention that despite what I said above, I think apps are doing a good job at making exploration kinda easier. Been digging wefwef/voyager and looking forward to Boost and Sync to check out.
JoYo@lemmy.ml · -1 pts · 3y
where are the technical criticisms?
OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml · -4 pts · 3y
The redditors are really racist and really anticommunist sometimes. I get that the admin wants a diversity of opinion but the orientalism feels pretty intense nowadays