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The Lemmy User Experience is Better When Centralized into Fewer Instances (monero.town)

submitted 1 year ago by Jeknilah@monero.town to c/technology@beehaw.org

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Most people access the Fediverse through one of the large instances: lemmy.world, kbin, or beehaw. New or small instances of Lemmy have no content by default, and can most easily get content by linking to larger Lemmy instances. This is done manually one "Community" at a time (I spent 15 minutes doing this yesterday). Meanwhile, on larger instances, content naturally aggregates as a result of the sheer number of users. Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it's inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances. It is probable that these instances follow in the footsteps of Reddit- the cycle repeats.

I actually think the Fediverse is in the beginning the process of fragmenting into siloed smaller, centralized instances. Beehaw, which is on the list of top instances, just blacklisted everyone from lemmy.world. Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other. It is possible that this fragmentation and instability? of Lemmy instances will kill the viability of Federated Reddit altogether, but hopefully not.

These are my main takeaways from my three days on the Fediverse. I will stick around to see if the Fediverse can sustain itself after the end of the Reddit blackouts.

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[–] tet42@ka.tet42.org 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a separate website people have to go to and search.

Peoples are lazy. They don't want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn't know it exists, its wonky at best.

If a user cant type "Stephen King community" in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn't exist and give up OR they are going to be hitting that "Create Community" button.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For sure, as much as I want users to be smarter... well my experience in development tells me they never will be. I literally had one user ping me on Lemmy asking how to join, I gave them pictures detailing steps. They were on mobile and gave up because "The subscribe button was in the sidebar and it was too confusing"

That's what we're up against. The extra button click was too much for some users.

Lemmy has to get more user friendly when it comes to subscribing. You're absolutely right it needs to be one search and click "subscribe". They should bring the feddit browser into lemmy really.

[–] Taxxor@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel you. When creating an UI you can think of thousands of possibilities which might not be clear to someone and design it in a way that couldn't possibly be misunderstood, then show it to different people who all agree that it's clearly structured and logical..... and the minute you release it you get posts from users you didn't know could even exist on their own.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 1 points 1 year ago

yup, which is exactly how the lemmy devs must feel about us, "wtf it's so simple", but everyone's brain works differently. As a dev myself, you really do kind of start to resent your users after a while