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.
I don’t really agree that it’s much easier to start on Reddit. Especially nowadays.
-Post from an IP that was once used by a banned account? Also banned (after first being shadowbanned)
-Try to post in any niche sub of your choosing after making an account? Forget it, wait three weeks and farm 3K karma first (which encourages shitposting and reposting, lowering quality)
-Deviate a fraction of an inch from whatever sub’s 500-page rulebook? Banned.
-Try to argue an unbanning? That’s a permanent mute.
-Post anything - and I do mean anything - in a “wrong” sub, get immediately permabanned by a slew of subs you didn’t even know existed.
-Some mod doesn’t agree with something you posted? Even if it was 5 years ago in a sub that has since been deleted? Banned and muted.
Reddit is an absolutely terrible experience for new posters. How they even manage to retain a tenth of them is beyond me. I encourage them to keep it up however, more traffic for Lemmy.
Another to add: Caught an IP ban for “report abuse” after reporting several bigots. Couldn’t have been more than 5. No warning or previous infractions, just straight up IP banned. Appealing did nothing, of course. Eventually just stopped caring.
Saw quite a few people saying they had the same thing happen. The general consensus of those threads was just not to report *anything *anymore…
This post is about UI and onboarding tho, not about mod behaviour.
Yeah new users are like, semi-shadow banned for a while
Here’s another for your list:
This is only if you aren’t logged in. If you login to reddit you can use a VPN fine. It is still so incredibly annoying though.
Oh interesting to know thank you. I nuked my accounts there so am not doing that, I guess.