There have been various posts here in the last days describing how difficult it is for new people to start using Lemmy. In fact they are absolutely correct, it is much easier to get started on Reddit. But what many forget is that Lemmy is not a corporation employing dozens of full-time designers, running A/B-tests and so on. Lemmy is an open source project run by volunteers, with only @dessalines and me working on it full-time. Neither of us is a particularly good designer, and our time is mainly spent working on the backend (database, federation, api), and preparing the upcoming 1.0 release.
If you see anything on join-lemmy.org or in the Lemmy UI itself that could be improved, the best option is to make that improvement yourself. Both of them use standard web technologies (nodejs, tailwindcss, inferno etc). The userbase here is quite technical so there are many of you able to contribute. We rarely reject any pull requests as long as they make a real improvement. Though it usually requires a little back and forth to review the changes and then address the review comments.
You can find the source code for join-lemmy.org here and follow development instructions in the readme. Regarding the default Lemmy UI go here and read the documentation with development instructions. If you are not a developer you can still help, for example by improving the documentation. Additionally you can make changes to the texts for joinlemmy and lemmy-ui.
All this said, there have also been some suggestions to make onboarding easier by directing new users to a hardcoded default instance. This may sound like a good idea at first but won’t work well in practice. Running such an instance would take significant time for administration and moderation, but we maintainers are already too busy. Besides it would be impossible to reach an agreement who this default instance should federate with or how exactly it should be moderated. So if you want to get nontechnical users to Lemmy, the solution is to link them directly to a specific instance based on their interests.
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Hey if an old guy like me can figure it out its not hard .
They are entitled and don’t want to expend effort
The userbase here is quite technical so there are many of you able to contribute.
As a project manager, I can help by ballooning the scope and setting the deadline to yesterday! Doing my part!
Don’t forget about asking how the project is going too!
Didn’t be so hard on yourself. You can also pester us about the status of Jira tickets.
Also, why haven’t you closed that low priority ticket and you keep working the high priority tickets that are new.
My old company solved that problem by making everything high priority by default, with efforts directed by the whims of the CTO.
That’s a recipe for disaster if I’ve ever heard of one. Fixing Jane in accounting’s monitor or figuring out the routing table for the entire enterprise. All top priority!
Honestly, if my PM never pestered me about the status of my tickets, I would never close them. Some of us need the pestering!
I got you guys, lets start with daily standup to get everyone on the same page.
Oh, I can do project management too!
Your next task is waves hands around … the thing … waves hands around some more … like the other thing … but different.
I’m doing my small part.
Went from 100% lurker on Reddit to regularly active lemmy commenter
Same. I still occasionally browse Reddit, but I have a rule that I don’t post or comment there. I do post and comment here.
Don’t forget to adblock them so you’re draining the resources, minutely and slowly, but draining nonetheless.
I don’t internet without uBlock. I honestly couldn’t imagine it any other way.
Same, I only lurk to see what’s popping but dont comment here.
It’s so much easier to comment and get replies here.
FWIW, I think the design and layout of lemmy is superb. Way better than reddit, old and new.
You guys made a lot of good decisions.
“Which server do I join?” seems to be a sticking point for a lot of people.
The “Browse servers” page does say at the top “You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which one you choose”, but on showing this page you immediately scroll that message off the screen. Maybe if you kept that bit visible it would help.
Also I think comparing it with email servers might be helpful. People already know they can email anyone from any email server, and that signing up to, say, Posteo, doesn’t mean you can only email other Posteo users.
it doesn’t matter which one you choose
That’s not really true though, every instance has it’s own rules, and it’s own federation policies, not to mention the other instances that don’t federate with it.
I’m already on lemmy, so it’s not like I haven’t gone through this before, yet I still haven’t made a pixelfed account despite being interested because I don’t want to just go for the biggest instance and I have no idea how to vet the other ones.
I think it’s better to keep it simple for new users. Tell them it doesn’t matter which server since that is theoretically true in a general sense. No need to overwhelm them with all the asterisks. Once they start engaging, they’ll learn the nuances and can change instances.
I’m the OP of one of the posts that blew up about UX.
This is great news, I will look into building something like join-lemmy/onboarding that could guide users, or improving join-lemmy
Its best if you improve the existing site, that way you dont have to worry about hosting, or directing users to your new site.
Nice !
The great thing about Lemmy is that it is an open source project and you can tweak the UI yourself if you have a bit of HTML and CSS knowledge. Do not be put off by fancy words like Bootstrap, Inferno, Tailwind, many are just HTML, CSS, or Javascript under the hood.
If anyone on here is looking for a more a more accessible Lemmy theme, I helped make one recently for the instance RBlind: RBlind Lemmy Themes (Codeberg repo). I made detailed documentation as well which could be helpful for theme developers or for those interested in helping improve Lemmy’s accessibility.
Since making the theme, I’ve been making some pull requests (PRs) with lemmy-ui and lemmy-docs to try improve the UI and docs based on some of the things I saw while developing the theme. I hadn’t done anything involving PRs before but the Lemmy team dessalines and nutomic and other contributors have been very receptive so far and offering helpful suggestions. The changes are small but every bit counts, and when they trickle down to all users I am hoping it’ll be a positive change for many users.
Also remember to be nice. I see heated arguments regressing into ad hominems by the third comment pretty regularly. We can be better than Reddit
You and you being so nice made me switch to ad hominem faster than usual! How the person like you can be so terribly pleasant? Treat yourself, you fellow lemming.
I don’t have much to say, but thank you for working on lemmy all these years.
I can complain about it a lot sometimes, but I’m very grateful for both the communities and the developers that kickstarted the fediverse, and for free too! So, thank you ❤️
If you or other people want to discuss the development of fedisoftware for beginners, or just growing as a whole you and everyone else are more than welcome at [email protected]!
Good post
Also, [email protected] for people who want to help promoting Lemmy Mbin Piefed
I can confirm. These guys are very open to pull requests that improve the platform.
All this said, there have also been some suggestions to make onboarding easier by directing new users to a hardcoded default instance. This may sound like a good idea at first but won’t work well in practice. Running such an instance would take significant time for administration and moderation, but we maintainers are already too busy. Besides it would be impossible to reach an agreement who this default instance should federate with or how exactly it should be moderated. So if you want to get nontechnical users to Lemmy, the solution is to link them directly to a specific instance based on their interests.
Wholeheartedly agree with this. Also people should get use to taking responsibility for their online experiences. Corporations have made people stupid to the point they reject autonomy.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the effort to make joining Lemmy easier has some downsides. One of the nicest things about these communities is how easy it is to have good conversations with internet strangers. I’ve grown to appreciate and hope for Lemmy not trying to be a Reddit replacement. In fact, I’m totally fine with “the masses” staying in Spez’s data harvesting machine. If, one day, Lemmy gets as popular as Reddit, I think it will inevitably have many of the same problems. It just theoretically won’t be selling your data for profit (one hopes, anyway). My wife isn’t super-techy, and I explained the concept of Lemmy to my wife in about 10 minutes. She set up an account in about 5.
To me, it’s not that using or joining Lemmy is hard. It’s that a lot of people have come to loathe change. They’re told that Lemmy is “like Reddit,” so why leave Reddit, all their accumulated Internet points, and their familiar communities/echo chambers? Pretty much all of them also use other data-harvesting social media sites, so they mostly don’t care about that aspect. When I tell my friends about Lemmy I talk about how the size of the communities is really conducive to good conversations from wide enough ranges of opinions and experiences, compared to Reddit’s too much of everything including trolls.
I agree with the general feeling, but we could probably have a bit more activity while still keeping that feeling.
100k monthly active users would allow most of the communities promoted on [email protected] to have more than one or two regular posters
Forgot to add that I’m not saying Lemmy is perfect as is. For sure there are things that can be improved and tweaked. And by all means, people who want to contribute should be encouraged and applauded. I’m just saying that the community that’s grown here is pretty great, and growth coming from slow-ish trickle of new users probably wouldn’t threaten that. Right now, Lemmy has a good late-90s, early 00s community feeling, and I really enjoy it.
One of the nicest things about these communities is how easy it is to have good conversations with internet strangers.
Maybe at that point people would use the Local feed more when they want to interact with their neighbors?
I have nothing to add except I hope you’re still enjoying Lord of the Rings.
I do, although the sections in Mordor are a bit tedious to get through. But its worth it for all the details that were left out of the movies.
There’s still plenty more detail waiting for you after LotR!
I definitely plan to read the Silmarillion, because the history of middle earth sounds so interesting.
It’s a great book!
It’s worth it! I only read it last year and it gave me a whole new level of appreciation for the other stories.
Once you’ve read the Silmarillion, there’s also The Children of Húrin. If you start from the Hobbit > LOTR > Silmarillion > CoH, it’s basically a steady progression of increasing epicness and tragedy.
I suppose the Silmarillion is the most epic, but Children of Húrin is the most intensely tragic.
It’s a very different style. I couldn’t slog through it
My proposal have been a little more complicated, but IMO works well for a BFU:
- create some set of rules for “default instances” - every instance that wants to be in the list must follow them and will be periodically checked
- I don’t have any particular rules in mind, but some examples might include active moderation team, obviously registrations being open and if you really want to make it easy, either no application question or having it automatically approved by an automod of some kind
- on join-lemmy, present a registration form that will create an account on a randomly selected instance from the pool and redirect there afterwards
- there should be a link somewhere for “experts” where you could link to the current wizard
I’m willing to work on this if we can sit down and agree on the criteria for the pool. I can also ask my UX guy to help a little.
Feel free to text me here or on Matrix if this is something you think is worth pursuing. I’d also appreciate if you let me know it’s not the direction you want to go in.
I would call them “starter” instances. And I’m in agreement there should be a set of principles that these instances should follow but at the same time telling new users that it’s okay to switch instances. I started in .world but moved due to their increasingly conservative changes.
While I personally would steer new users away from .world, I think it’s more important to tell them it’s okay to switch instances.
I don’t have any particular rules in mind, but some examples might include active moderation team, obviously registrations being open and if you really want to make it easy, either no application question or having it automatically approved by an automod of some kind
Hexbear meets those requirements, which rule would you add to exclude them? Back in the day, exploding heads would fit them too
maybe they should need to maintain a certain percentage of high pop instances that federate with them. Basically establishing a standard of trust.
“At least 80% of instances with over 1,000 active users must federate with you to be a Lemmy starter instance.”
This guarantees that new users will see the majority of content, and the starter instances won’t be embroiled in federation wars. The % value and pop numbers can change to reduce it down to a manageable number of starter instances.
Interesting idea
That was just rules to make it work on the technical side - you’re not helping the user experience if you have to wait half a day until someone manually approves your registration.
The rest would need to be discussed and actually thought out (and agreed upon with Lemmy devs, who own the join-lemmy domain).
I haven’t given it much thought because I see no point if it never gets implemented.
Cooking up global fediverse rules specifically meant to try and exclude an instance is crossing the line imo. If you don’t like interacting with them, join one of the many instances that have already blocked them.
This kind of crusade goes against the spirit of the fediverse imo.
Have a look at that frontpage and tell me if you think an average potential new joiner is going to stick around: https://lemmygrad.ml/
As long as it’s clearly labeled as something like “a communist instance”, why not? Some potential Lemmy users would probably feel right at home there. It doesn’t even have to be a controversial label, just a factual description that the Lemmygrad people would agree with.
In that case I agree. The issue I see is people saying “just give new joiners a random instance across the top 20”, denying the unique culture of a few of them
Ah, yes, that makes sense now! If it is an automatic, random server selection, then I also agree that it should be only generic, non-controversial instances that are selected.
These aren’t global fediverse rules, they’re constraints meant to apply specifically to the new user experience on Lemmy only.
I like this!
create some set of rules for “default instances” - every instance that wants to be in the list must follow them and will be periodically checked
I don’t have any particular rules in mind, but some examples might include active moderation team, obviously registrations being open and if you really want to make it easy, either no application question or having it automatically approved by an automod of some kindThe Mastodon Server Covenant is pretty much what you describe here, and could be used as a starting point: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
Here’s my idea for rules as well as the ones u came up with: No illegal shit No extremist ideology No hexbear or ml cos they will claim they are being unfairly censored and the irony of that is pretty funny.
- create some set of rules for “default instances” - every instance that wants to be in the list must follow them and will be periodically checked
