Be the change you want to see in Lemmy
Be the change you want to see in Lemmy
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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As someone who is "stuck" here after being permabanned on all accounts on reddit I can say that the number one "issue" Lemmy has is also the greatest part about Lemmy. The fact that every instance can have its own copy of the "same" sub.
I completely understand why someone coming from reddit is going to search up "ask" and they will see a few ask Lemmy subs coming up. At a glance they won't know which one is "better" and why there are multiple.
Sadly most people will turn around and leave at that point. The average internet user will just go somewhere else the moment they feel lost or confused by anything. The few that might stick through it and make a post asking why there are multiple instances of the same type of sub are likely to be spoken down to by a bunch of condescending nerds that feel superior to outsider idiots. I know that many of you are very kind and welcoming, but enough of the user base are elitist pricks about everything that new users will notice immediately.
Lemmy can't seem to decide if they want to grow or if they want to gate keep. I think the reality is that as more people are blanket banned from reddit without any reason such as myself that people will keep slowly trickling in.
The only "change" I think Lemmy needs is its user feedback. I have been banned from so many subs for completely unrelated things and without going and looking up the mod logs for my own name I wouldnt have any clue whatsoever. I would just think that Lemmy was broken constantly since it just gives you submitting errors instead of telling you that you have been banned or anything.
The "automod" messages are basically useless as they don't tell you what rule you broke, which comment it was specifically or who actually initiated the ban. I know they aren't always actually "automatic" bans because I have gotten messages from automod for comments I left weeks ago. So either they are the slowest and least attentive bots on planet earth or the mods of those subs are using the automod to hide behind as a layer of anonymity.
There are multiple similar subs on reddit as well though, often with very slightly different names
You make a good point. The key difference is that some instances block other instances (or at least that has been my understanding of how Lemmy works from my limited time here). So depending on where they sign up they might not even be able to access certain subs.
Plus the "duplicate" subs on reddit tend to be one of two reasons. The original moderators let the sub die or enough people didn't get along with how the original sub was being moderated and they left to make their own copy. It's pretty rare that there are two identical subs that have equal engagement.
It’s pretty rare that there are two identical subs that have equal engagement.
It's rare here too
[email protected] hs 1400 weekly active users
[email protected] has 470
[email protected] discussed some consolidation in the past to centralize activity due to the smaller userbase
This is what I'm seeing so far. It seems very hard to find very active communities for various topics. Movies should be an easy one with broad appeal but even the ones you posted here are not that active.
And the seemingly most active one for television is called [email protected] Why does it have movies in its name when the header is Shows and TV? Confusing and it's not even that active.
That still doesn't address the fact that not all instances are created equal. And it's not immediately apparent which instances block others.
I usually go with
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
That way people are pointed to two reliable instances.