A lot of us are in tech and we come across these problems and just troubleshoot our way around them and don't really think about them, so I figured a "case study" might be helpful. Image unrelated.
Anyway, yesterday I tried making an alt account on lemmy.world. When last we left the situation, I had been notified that my registration application had been denied, but I'd been asked to confirm my email and https://lemmy.world/u/sergio had been created. A couple helpful commenters suggested my account might still be under review.
- Today I tried logging in again. But when I entered my username and password, I got a popup that said "incorrect login credentials". Maybe I needed to verify my email again? I went to my email, clicked the "verify your email" link, and just got a page with text that said "verify email" and nothing else. Maybe it didn't like me using my username to log in? So I tried logging in with my EMAIL and my password, and still got that "incorrect login credentials".
- Maybe something's wrong with my password? I'm using a password manager but OK, let's just try changing my password. I clicked on the "forgot email" link on the login page. I entered my email address and clicked "reset password"... and nothing happens. No feedback, and I don't get an email. (10 minutes so far).
- maybe I should check https://lemmy.world/u/sergio ? Hey, that's no longer there, I just get an error! I check the user page of another lemmy.world user and it works, so it's not a server problem. Maybe my application really was denied? Was it really reviewed? What do I do now?
(my intuition is to try again with a different username, email address, computer, and browser from a different location at a different time of day...)
36 Comments
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 30 pts · 1y
Unfortunately the lemmy default interface is shit at telling if your account application has been rejected. That UI is thankfully being replaced. You can try using a different UI like tesseract which should provide more accurate information on why you cannot login.
But if your application has been denied, and you didn't receive a manual confirmation from the l.w. admins that it's been now approved, it's still denied. I don't know why people suggested to try again.
oce@jlai.lu · 16 pts · 1y
I thought LW was trying to be some kind of big trusty default instance, what are the reasons they deny people? They can't scale further?
asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev · 10 pts · 1y
They sure are trying to be one. But I don't want people to think that there is a default instance for every platform in the fediverse. It's destroying the decentralization we have. I abandoned my 2 year old LW account last year and I only occassionally check in to see if I got any reports from !asklemmy@lemmy.world or not.
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 1y
!ask@lemm.ee for another ask community, for people reading this
Sergio@slrpnk.net · 7 pts · 1y
When software devs do user experience studies, they ask the end users to "think aloud" (while doing something) or "tell us why you did that" (after the fact). So I agree with your comment, but in the spirit of a user experience study...
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 1y
I get where you're coming from, but this sort of qa should be done in coordination with the service provider to work well.
Die4Ever@programming.dev · 16 pts · 1y
Just don't use lemmy.world I've seen lots of people having issues signing up with them, and they're overpopulated anyways
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 9 pts · 1y
@MrKaplan@lemmy.world ?
MrKaplan@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 1y
Hello @Sergio@slrpnk.net,
our registration application system is completely automated and we're making it very clear on our signup page what text you need to provide in order for your application to be approved.
Additionally, you should have received an email about your registration being rejected within a minute of verifying your email. Unfortunately your application fell within a window of these notifications being broken on our end, as we had to fix some stuff following our recent Lemmy update. Other users will generally receive this notification when their application is rejected.
As you explained why you'd want to sign up on lemmy.world rather than entering the required text your application had been denied. Our application processing system is also purging accounts from the database when the application gets rejected, so the username is available again and you'll be able to sign up again with the same name.
Sergio@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1y
Oooh, that makes sense.... thanks for the info, fam!
threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 1y
In the future, could signups be temporarily closed during these periods, or is it too difficult to anticipate when such a period might be?
MrKaplan@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y
it was just the purges and the emails being broken at the time. once we discovered the breakage we immediately started working on fixing it. the problem was that we initially missed that it broke.
zephorah@lemm.ee · 5 pts · 1y
Option C: use the PC version to sign up and then use an easy mode Reddit-clone app, scroll the main feed and block all the communities you’re not interested in.
nuko147@lemm.ee · 3 pts · 1y
Didn't have any problems with my lemm.ee account so far, and i can fetch all federal communities.
What apps are there? I'm using Jerboa, and I'm very happy with it, but i want to know any alternatives.
JayGray91@kbin.earth · 5 pts · 1y
you can check out this community for a bunch of apps !lemmyapps@lemmy.world
or at https://join-lemmy.org/apps they also list apps for web browser (front ends), android and iOS.
nuko147@lemm.ee · 4 pts · 1y
Thank you. I didn't know there are so many. Gonna try Alexandrite for my desktop, someone mentioned it before, but i thought it was only a web page.
JayGray91@kbin.earth · 3 pts · 1y
I personally like tesseract than alexandrite for desktop, although that's not listed in that page I linked
unfortunately the tesseract dev is calling it quits because of burning out with Lemmy development.
it is a fork of photon either way, so when something broke if tesseract truly won't be updated, I'll probably use that instead
Sergio@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 1y
Yeah, I should have mentioned I'm using the default PC web interface. (If this was a real user experience study there'd be a section with the versions of everything used.)
JayGray91@kbin.earth · 4 pts · 1y
I personally am abandoning my l.w. account.
from a content discovery and interaction aspect, lemmy.world has its fair share of federation fights. this would mean you wouldn't see content from instances that defederated them, nor will users from those instances see yours
and from the aspect of the software of Lemmy itself, it's not up to date. I personally am not sure what that entails, but it's probably not good
A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 1y
Huh? I thought lemmy.world just had an update like Sunday.
JayGray91@kbin.earth · 5 pts · 1y
that's good news then. but it wasn't when I looked way back idk 3 weeks ago?
that's not the main reason I wanted to jump ship though. it's the defederation that pushes me to try other lemmy and even mbin instances.
A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y
Yeah that's fair. I wound up here when I first migrated but I'm thinking about changing instances too, mostly for the same reason.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y
On the opposite side of the same coin, many LW users want LW to defederate a lot of the fring troll instances. Ones often with very small userbases but constantly churn out troll accounts.
Like, can you name an example that's not federated with LW but federated with a large amount of other instances?
LW seems to default to federation and only stops well after users start demanding it
JayGray91@kbin.earth · 1 pts · 1y
No I can't, and if I'm trying to pull something from my memory it would be disingenuous.
From what I have learned, I prefer to use instances like lemm.ee or lemmy.zip for example for lemmy. Which they hardly defederate with instances, but I block the communities or instances I don't want to see.
On the plus side of opinionated instances though, new users can just get an already curated view of the threadiverse going with them, so less work to themselves blocking whatever they don't like.
cm0002@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y
There are some I can think of that are defed'd for very good reasons, like 2/3rds of the Tankie Triad, unfortunately not .ml...so far
Beehaw is defederated, but iirc that's on them not LW
There was talk a while back about .world not federating with any new instances by default, but I think they've stopped doing that or the claims were overblown to begin with
Looking on https://defed.xyz/check?name=lemmy.world&software=lemmy
Nothing stands out to me, well except for some truly disgusting sounding places that can stay defed'd, like Truth Social 🤢 lmao
MrKaplan@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y
iirc there were talks at some point about limiting federation with new instances due to larger scale abuse and troll accounts, but that was mostly just general discussion, primarily with other instance admins. not something that we ever implemented.
I'm personally against a whitelist approach, such as requiring vouching by another instance, on lemmy.world. some other instances may want to follow an approach like that, but that is mostly something for instances that have a lot stricter moderation in place to e.g. provide a safe(r) space to their community. especially considering that we host many large communities, switching to a whitelist approach would significantly disrupt new instances from establishing themselves.
one of the topics that were mentioned in that context was some kind of "application" system for federation, where instances would have to e.g. provide some contact details that could be used to report abuse, as there is currently no standard for that. we generally try to avoid defederation whenever possible, unless instances are e.g. completely unmoderated, such as recently the case with feddit.rocks. we usually try to address issues in a more targeted fashion, such as targeting new users on certain instances when they get abused by trolls or just finding methods to target specific posting/commenting patterns.
cm0002@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y
Ah that could have been it lol
Have you guys ever considered a voting based approach for users to deal with major issues/decisions? DB0, IMO, has a fantastic voting system where donating users carry a full vote, local but non-donating users had something like 2/3rds or a half vote and everyone else was just for "vibes check"
I think with a voting based approach there would be greater participation for the .world user base which in turn would lead to less... antipathy I think for decisions like defederation or federation of individual instances.
MrKaplan@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y
we thought about this before, but we only rarely have decisions where a community vote would be relevant. in most cases involving defederation, when we are already at that point, it's some kind of moderation issue, which wouldn't be solved by a community vote.
with the example of feddit.rocks, there were several spam accounts created that mass spammed nsfw content in random sfw communities with zero response from the admin, it even stayed up for more than a month there. leaving such cases to community decisions would significantly increase the amount of time we have to spend on moderation.
for cases where it would be relevant, we're yet to find a good solution for that that isn't easily gamed by creating a bunch of alt accounts.
HubertManne@piefed.social · 4 pts · 1y
Don't know if it will help but I had an issue with piefed where my username had capital letters in it and apparently the system did not like that.
JerkyChew@lemmy.one · 3 pts · 1y
Yeah I've been on Lemmy for over a year and I have no idea how it works or how I even set it up in the first place. I use it on mobile and decided to try browsing it on my desktop but had no idea how to log in. What's my instance? Why does it seem like I have separate logins on multiple instances?Which user/password do I use?
Oh, and trying to submit things on mobile is impossible as well. I don't have permission to submit to some community because it's on another instance? I can't just, ya know, federate my existing login session? Well fuck me for trying, I guess.
I gave up and just went back to old.reddit.com. Reddit on PC, Lemmy on mobile.
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 7 pts · 1y
https://lemmy.one/ , same credentials as mobile
You don't, there's a pinned post on !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca to help you about this as well as your other questions
Madbrad200@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 1y
You need to access communities from the instance your account is on. Your instance is https://lemmy.one/ - < this is the website you need to use to access Lemmy. If you wish to use another instance, e.g https://lemm.ee/ you'd need to make a new account there.
If you wanted to submit a post in this community for example, you'd navigate to https://lemmy.one/c/fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com - note the end of the url. community_name@instance_community_is_located_on
MemmingenFan923@feddit.org · 3 pts · 1y
I don't know whether it is due technical issues or the admins reject your registration.
I would go to another instace. Fortunately there is not one instance.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe · 14 pts · 1y
You're advising a technical solution to a technical person.
OP's not looking for a solution to his specific problem, he's showing that as a technical person he's faced with an issue he's unsure how to resolve - now imagine the average person facing this problem.
OP's right - the sign-up process is clumsy and problematic on any instance for the average user.
Sergio@slrpnk.net · 7 pts · 1y
Yeah, maybe I should re-emphasize in the post that this is a "user experience" kind of post. Personally I have lots of hardware, OSes, and phones laying around (and an existing lemmy account!) so I'll figure it out eventually.
FWIW a lot of companies don't do user experience studies. Apple is famous for it, but even big places like Google and Microsoft often skip on this.
arrow74@lemm.ee · 5 pts · 1y
Yep the learning curve from logging in to finding communities took about 45 minutes or so for me.
I can see that being a turn off for many users
TiggerYumYum@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 0 pts · 1y