Fediverse

Well, when I started to use lemmy I had a few problems:

1. I read something on the landing page about "Mastodon account works too" so tried that, so basically confused fediverse, activitypub, mastodon and lemmy and wondered why nothing worked. Oops.
2. I tried to join a community that was meant to migrate away from reddit, but found two duplicates. So I wasn't sure which one was the correct one. Ultimately the migration failed, even though it was a software oriented community
3. Then I soon wanted to make a new account on a server that doesn't require an email. Because emails today are basically personally identifiable for security agencies.
4. Then I found out that socialists are called tankies on lemmy and some of the main socialist instances are banned by the limbrols. So I made a new account and posted a little and had an interesting discussion about voting in proto-fascist democracies and promptly got banned by the tankies. Oh well.
5. Then I had a discussion about how calling russian people "orcs" is racist. You guessed it, banned.
6. Well several accounts later, here I am, the last sane man on the internet and you all fucking suck hahaha

I do think lemmy is worthwhile and can be fun, but as a reddit alternative it has already failed. You cannot purge insanity by splitting it up into smaller insanlets. That's just schizophrenia.

I feel like probably the biggest UX improvement Lemmy, and the fediverse more widely, could do is to make user migration more seamless. I’m thinking federated SSO, basically, where once you have an account anywhere on the fediverse you should a) be able to use that account anywhere else in the fediverse and b) move where that account is hoeted to anywhere else in the fediverse.

I believe this is related to whatever the hell ActivityPod is doing? Feel free to correct me on that. Regardless, get something like this in place as well as better instance and services discovery (and maybe the ability to find your other connected services from you ‘account’ pages on whatever service you’re on) and I think people might start to think of fediverse as less ‘an alternative’ and more ‘the better one’.

Basically, we need standard protocols for user data management, transfer, credentials management, and service and instance discovery. I’m sure some of that exists, the important thing will be to streamline and standardise the actual UX.

I sincerely hope there's less content here than Reddit, forever. I hope the UI keeps the masses out, and the technically savy are the only ones here.

I want to doomscroll less, I want to be astroturfed less. I want to interact with more humans and fewer bots, even when that means I interact less. I want fewer AI prompts, AI Art and corpo spam ads masquerading as engagement. I want less video and more text. Overall, I want to be spending less time on the internet, on my phone, and I don't want to hear about every last toxic thing Trump did to drive me crazy. Lemmy helps me control that feed better, so I deleted my reddit account and I hope to stay here until I manage to stop opening social media at all.

Lemmy right now feels like the internet before the long september. I hope it never changes.

And they don't have to join. I really don't mean this in a dismissive way and respect their opinion. But why all this worrying about the need to have the fediverse dominate all social media? Maybe it's meant to be this way: your vibe decides your tribe. My vibe isn't commercial, toxic political talk, or influencers, thus my tribe is the fediverse instead of IG or Tiktok.

Even worse, the Tankies are basically running the landing page that asks them which instance to join.

We should probably make a non-tankie version and get it trending for the Algorithm.

Lots of Lemmy clients have great UI. The default web interface looks fine as well.

Wait till they try out Matrix. No client works properly and all the mobile clients are really bad.

I switched to Mbin but Lemmy has a variety of interfaces, not so sure this is necessarily a UX issue but an understanding issue.

Tell them that if you join any Lemmy instance (e.g. Marxist-Leninist instance of Lemmy (not Hexbear)) and if you ignore some stuff on the instance, then it's a pretty compelling experience.

Unlike twitter, if there are UI issues, people have a lot of options to try different clients, both mobile and web. I don't use one only, I flip between a bunch of them, both on web and mobile. Sometimes the vanilla Lemmy experience is what you want, other times someone might have made a great ui for browsing one specific community that you subscribe to.

I'm also somewhere against the argument of it being difficult to pick a server, too difficult to know if it's the right one for me, etc etc. In other parts of life, people make decisions on this all the time, day in day out, without batting an eyelid, and even on issues with a bigger impact on them, than which federated instans they sign up to a service on. Mobile phone subscriptions, which email provider you should use, what internet provider you should sign up with.

For some reason, social media seems to be one of these areas where we think it's totally fine that monopolies exist, and options are not... an option. We need to resocialise the idea that it doesn't hurt to make a conscious choice about where you lay your identity online, and what you sink your time and attention into.

Try not caring. The more Reddit users come here the more it's going to suck.

This is just bot-driven FUD anyway, Lemmy is nothing like old Reddit and it wouldn't be disqualifying if it was.