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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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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Very frustrating for sure, I feel like I'm constantly playing ping pong with new users.

New user doesn't understand lemmy and searches for community on service like lemmy.ml. Community doesn't exist so the spam the "Create Community" button or spam the admin for it. Admin is overworked/doesn't know/busy building the site and says "okay", meanwhile there is already a community of 100+ members on another instance.

For me, I built my instance to take some weight off of the main instances, thought "hey here's a group of communities that are pretty close knit that don't need to put pressure on the already overloaded servers", and I still get people who are posting "I made ____ community on lemmy.ml come join!" and it's like dude, ffs.

For example, I run an instance that focuses on a genre of music. Thus, I'm pretty dang open to anything even remotely open to that.

If it doesn't exist seriously you could have made it on my instance and modded it, give the central servers a break. I'm all for spreading the love but seriously, don't just make it by default on the popular instances
If it does exist, ffs just look around. At this point most communities on Reddit have something analogous here, or ther'es something similar you could post in first asking if there is one. "If /c/cyberpunk2077 doesn't exist maybe ask /c/gaming first. (and yes, cyberpunk2077 does exist)".
This is separate from if you don't like a community and you want to truly create your own. That's great, you should feel empowered to do so, but don't just spam the "Create Community" option if you haven't even tried to see if it's out there yet. At the very least, search out some instances and figure out where your best home should be. At this point it probably isn't lemmy.ml or beehaw.org.

That turned a bit more ranty than I expected.

[–] tet42@ka.tet42.org 6 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 4 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 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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 however obvious they seem and then 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 where you ask yourself how they 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