I’m a reddit user and that’s also where I first heard about lemmy the first time.

Yesterday I decided to give it a try, current events pushed me away from everything American and so I thought it was about time.

I searched for something like ‘lemmy getting started’ and landed on this site: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html

So the first greeting is a wall of text. After I read through it, I found myself here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Now I got a bunch of options with no real way to evaluate what’s what. I spent some time there looking through the options and didn’t really know what to choose and what the impact would be. I used a search engine again to look for some opinions about the biggest ones which lead me nowhere, mostly.

So I kinda gave up and selected programming.dev because that’s close enough to what I do professionally. I clicked on join and was presented with this https://programming.dev/signup

So I don’t know if that differs from instance to instance, but you need a moment to process this. The first few fields are obvious but then it starts to get a little weird. Instead of a checkbox or even implicit accepting of TOS and privacy policy (by registering here you agree to…) you have to take or copy paste that exact sentence into that answer box with a preview button(?) and then fill in the captcha. After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.

But it didn’t end here. Because I found that the webui wasn’t that great on mobile, I wanted an Android app. So I ended up here: https://join-lemmy.org/apps

And yet again was confronted with a bunch options I somehow had to evaluate. I’m still in the process finding an app I really like.

Now I know this is no rocket science, and having options is a good thing usually.

But still considering the average usually not tech savvy user, all of that is too much by quite a bit. That’s overwhelming for the majority of people.

This whole thing needs to be a 10 second streamlined process. There should be one button to get you started. The instance selection site tells you: ‘You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which one you choose.’

So if that’s the case, why bother the user with it? I admit I know jack shit about the fediverse, but if I were to design such a thing, I’d separate the IdP (identity provider) from the service/content providers. Have a couple of them redundantly, hosted by different parties so one entity can not shut down everything. Let the user register once, replicate that identity across the IdPs and let some interest selection wizard determine which content instances the use should be added to.

I know that’s a big architecture change and will never happen. So maybe have that one obvious registration routine for a user and choose a first instance for the user based on interests or randomly (from a curated list to prevent users landing on some extreme instances) if the user can not be bothered to fill in their interests.

Have one default app which is good and recommended that. Let the app have sensible defaults (like the sorting thing), present most popular content first to hook the user.

Let the user look for alternatives later if they want to do that.

Don’t let the user do all the homework upfront before they even know whether they even care and if it’s worth the effort. Most people simply won’t do it.

PS. Nope I do not know about ‘Piefed’. I’ll check it out later. It wasn’t mentioned on all that sites that I looked at and that’s part of the problem.

That’s just my 2 cents.

Yeah, it was sorted by active. Changed it to hot, let’s see how that goes. Thanks for the hint.

I’m a very new user who wanted to give this a chance, here are the friction points from my point of view:

1. The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn’t help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
2. Content discovery sucks ass. My feed stayed mostly the same since I started using Lemmy. I’m presented the same shit over and over again. I’m not sure if it’s something that I do wrong, if there is just no content or if that’s a side effect of ‘no tracking at all’ but either way the experience is just bad
3. Someone in here already said it, but ‘Lemmy’ is a horrendous name. That alone was the reason why I didn’t bother to try it at all for a long time. Only recent events pushed me towards it but tbh I’m not sure I’ll stay.

In short the user experience is abysmal.