Please don’t link to Reddit. Let’s not boost their traffic.

Yeah for sure. I went to the Join Lemmy website and was so confused about where I was supposed to create an account. Once I found lemm.ee and their intro to Lemmy article, it got way easier.

It was straight forward for me - I did some googling to understand the way that different servers shared data, picked what I thought was a popular platform (lemm.ee) and setup shop with my first community (being migrated from you know where).

Yes. I still don’t quite understand how moderating works with federation (and critically, defederation). The advice of “Pick an instance that aligns with your values” is the most WTF advice I’ve ever seen when signing up for a site. Even worse is the conflicting advice that it didn’t matter since they all talk to each other, then followed by a warning that you have to choose an instance that will talk to your communities.

As bad as it was, at least the advice of “Go to lemmy.ml and sign up” was simple and direct, and most people could follow that without getting overwhelmed or confused

I thought I understood it at first but then I got confused when I visited other instances, but I think I get it now

edit: okay I’m still confused on how the search works

Lemmy was confusing at first, until I gave up and signed up somewhere. From then on the user experience was not flawless, but pretty solid. Default sorting for new accounts should probably be changed, but as soon as you discover “all” it’s smooth sailing.

I’ve since moved to an account on another instance, now that I have a better idea of what I want and what the instances are like, but I only lost a few comments in that move.

Somewhat yes, and still do. If I find a community I like the look of, there’s often a non-functional login page where after entering my details (correctly!) there’s just a spinner that spins forever without ever giving at least an error message, but if I prefer there are some [email protected] that look like an email address but aren’t, that I can bung into some search page somewhere that doesn’t always return anything but it might if I refresh it or it might not but if I keep trying then it might eventually but then it doesn’t for days so I start fiddling around with some other stuff and find that it suddenly works, but that other browser tab that still has that interesting thread open won’t register as subscribed no matter how much I refresh it even though the community works perfectly in the other tab, but then I can’t find the message I want to engage with in the tab where it works.

I’m a coder so I’m used to being persistent and working around bugs and poor UX, but your bog standard pleb isn’t going to be that patient with it - they just want to login, hit subscribe and it’s done (although to be fair that’s what I want too).

I’m sure there are good reasons for all this but when the Lemmy devs decide they have to prioritise a simple UX that Just Works no matter what context I think there’s a good chance it’ll be well placed to take over from previous chat communities. At least make that [email protected] clickable taking me to a page that with just one click at most gets me logged in and linked; this copy and paste business where you can’t double click it cos it’s not a word and you can’t triple click it cos then you get the whole paragraph is just dumb - OK, correction - hasn’t been streamlined yet because nobody’s realised how important this bit of a distributed system is yet.

I did and still do. The concept at a high level makes sense, but the application leaves me with questions.

The most confusing thing is that there is no “Lemmy” site. Rather its a federation of independent sites sharing content and comments. This is probably good practice for the transition to web 3.0 stuff. (and its the first time that I’ve ever thought that Web3.0 was legit and not just a bunch of marketing bs).

Once you’re on an instance, the rest SHOULD be transparent to the user.

But there are many technical hurdles (posts from unfederated instances missing, finding communities on another instance). There IS a learning curve where before there was almost none (just sign up at Reddit.com and start browsing).

To be fair, Lemmy is not mature, and the benefits of the fediverse are worth the learning curve. But that friction definitely could be reduced.

The most difficult part is to choose a server/instance. It’s like you want to install GNU/Linux, and you have hundreds of distributions to choose. But after you chose where you want to stay, it’s easier.

I tried Lemmy from a mobile phone and found it confusing at first. Kbin was much easier to use imho.

Everything is confusing to begin with. I was born not even able to take a shit correctly but here I am controlling my bowels like a big boy (most days).

Kbin is so much clearer to me, personally.