- Exclude explicit software bugginess or missing features
- Include experiences or knock-on effects that may have arisen from (1)
- Comparisons to Reddit are ok. We know the reasons for the differences, but this is just about expressing yourself
I want the app to open to frontpage, aka only the communities I subscribed to, sorted by New. I want it to take zero clicks to get here; I just want to open the app and have it there.
Apps are updating rapidly of course, but the last time I went through the main Lemmy apps on Android, the best one still took two clicks to get to my preferred view every time I close and relaunched the app.
You cn do this by changing your account settings.
As a general rule, the onboarding and discovery in the fediverse is pretty bloody terrible.
Its just super unattractive to join. If I am thinking about joining a platform I want to know if there is content that is interesting to me. Now if I go to https://join-lemmy.org/ what do I see? It greets me with explanations of the Licensing, tells me all the programming languages and frameworks, shows me pictures of code and something about mod tools and of course immediately offers me to run my own server. None of that is even remotely interesting to me even now that I am a registered user. Not to mention that the design is questionable. Then it says “Join a server”. I am not here to join a server, I am here to join a platform. And if I click on that I am met with about 50 different instances, of which I have no idea what to choose and what implications my choice has.
The whole federation thing, the design, everything is just unintuitive and unattractive to join.
where are the technical criticisms?
The “front page” of lemmy, either the local of the instance you’re on or the “all”, is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I’m not sure what the issue is with lemmy’s front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?
It’s too bad because the “front page” is the user’s first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.
In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.
Some sorting would be good. I’d also like to be able to hide posts without having to block the poster. Right now there is very little user control.
Lemmy has no algorithm.
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That’s not really what I was referring to. Sure it selects posts automatically but it’s not like it picks what it thinks a specific user is going to click on.
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Links between instances often don’t work as intended, and there’s no good way to redirect me from
some-other-instance.pub/c/cool-communitytomy-instance.pub/c/cool-community@some-other-instance.pubautomatically.You should check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fediredirect/. This works for redirecting both communities and posts, although the latter requires to give your log in credentials to the extension.
Looks nice. Some us browse on mobile though.
I also mainly browse on mobile haha. However loading posts from my home instance is often taken care of by the app (client).
There shouldn’t be votes. Activitypub itself shouldn’t have votes but I can understand the broader community around it wanting them to kludge in functionality of places they’re trying to ape.
If you’re coming from Reddit or wherever though and don’t see this as a perfect opportunity to get rid of the part of the site all the problems stem from or are enabled by, I don’t know what to say.
Get rid of the votes.
IMHO, It’s fine as long as there’s no account wide Reddit-style karma.
Is it fine the way it’s implemented, with no vote anonymity?
No, I don’t think so, but that’s a different aspect.
Do you think the issues with voting (Samey content, lowkey groupthink, manipulation, etc) are acceptable if there was some technical solution to vote anonymity?
Are you sure the issues you mentioned are caused by voting? I’m not certain, so I cannot answer your question.
I without a doubt am.
its not the only cause but its absolutley why reddit ended up so uniquely bad in those ways. the problems were systemic and voting was a big part of that system.
think on it, you got slashdot, then digg, then reddit. they all try to run with this new method of handling both content and discussion: ranked instead of threaded. slashdot falls apart because digg does it better. digg falls apart because it has the method right, but it’s trying to be legitimate news. reddit gets huge because it recognizes the ranked model is for social media as opposed to news and leans into it with all the bells and whistles. idk if reddit falls apart.
the canaries leave reddit for the fediverse and start lemmy. but why keep the things that made reddit bad?
In my opinion, the problems you mentioned are not caused by the voting system.
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Groupthink is caused by a lack of discipline. Obvious hot takes or otherwise poorly formulated comments should be downvoted. Well presented contrarian opinions should be upvoted. Perhaps educating users on using the system in its intended way – promoting healthy debate or interesting insight – is better than removing the system completely.
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Manipulation is caused by poor bot control, so while removing voting might help somewhat, this would be a band-aid at most. Unless you mean some sort of psyop manipulation that doesn’t involve automation, which voting can, in theory at least, help against by refuting attempts at manipulation.
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Duplicated content I have only seen in connection to the nature of the fediverse so far (i.e., same topic communities spread across multiple large instances). I guess some people would try to farm internet points by posting low quality content, but if people like that content and vote for it, what’s there to be done apart from blocking the community you don’t like?
Also Lemmy’s popularity would suffer if it was missing one of the key features of Reddit (“Full vote scores (+/-) like old Reddit.” is listed as one of the main features on the official website).
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The same problem I have when it comes to Mastodon/Misskey/Firefish - I feel like everything is so fragmented, like I have to jump from one place to another. Thankfully, this applies significantly less in the “threadiverse” (Outdated name, we definitely need a new one) because there aren’t 6 different platforms and tens of different forks, and Lemmy and Kbin are pretty much 100% compatible with one another, unlike those moments where you can’t see Mastodon re-toots on Firefish a lot of the time or sometimes accounts’ posts appear much later in a different instance. We don’t need to worry about that here.
On one hand, I kind of like that there are separate communities to check up on. It’s a very efficient way to waste time.
To me, all the complaints in this thread are a great filter. It keeps away all the people that are too lazy and/or incapable to figure out basic things, which are not the people I want to interact with online anyway
“It’s a good filter” is often just an excuse to not improve the UX. You hear this way more from open-source technically-inclined folks than you do from folks who care about building a product that people want to use.
It has sort of been said already, but I didn’t find a reply stating my exact criticism so I’ll chime in. Lemmy and the fediverse is confusing. Instances, federation, de-federating, and all the other techno-garble is not something most internet users have any frame of reference for and I imagine it is very off-putting to a vast majority of potential users.
I’m not usually one to harp on user experience but it’s just a mess trying to get into this whole thing. I was driven by a hatred for reddit to figure it out and I’m a software developer by trade, but still was scratching my head at wtf all these terms were and how it all works. Lemmy and the fediverse desperately needs some onboarding/marketing work and to ditch this sentiment of “if you can’t figure it out then we don’t want you here.”
I do want to mention that despite what I said above, I think apps are doing a good job at making exploration kinda easier. Been digging wefwef/voyager and looking forward to Boost and Sync to check out.
The redditors are really racist and really anticommunist sometimes. I get that the admin wants a diversity of opinion but the orientalism feels pretty intense nowadays
