Fediverse

This is quite concerning indeed.

We should start by being better at retaining what we already have.

Every person is valuable now.

Then start breeding yall

Just wait for Reddit to finally ban porn and we’ll have more users than we know what to do with

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.

After trying to convert a friend who heavily uses reddit, multiple times, I recommended him again the other day to leave the hellsite (reddit).

I didn't recommend Lemmy but have a while back.

He himself specifically brought up that he 'didn't vibe with Lemmy as much as reddit' and that he believes he would 'miss stories he would otherwise have liked to see' by switching to Lemmy.

Reddit has kept him more up to date than not over the past year - he believes had he not been using reddit he wouldn't have found out about [specific events in iran] as early as he did.

The other main pain point I've encountered is the small and niche community problem, which I'm sure we are all aware of - certain information feels like it can only be found on such small subreddits.

Therefore I have two suggestions:

• create a Lemmy instance that mirrors reddit, rather than have bots post reddit posts onto main Lemmy instances, create an instance that mirrors specific subreddits on request, including the comments of their posts, and allows Lemmy users to comment and reply back, where those comments are also propagated to reddit so that replies and discussion are mirrored also.

This would struggle due to reddit API and compute power requirements but the subreddits on request and a specific instance for these posts would eliminate the bot spam problem from earlier attempts at the same thing.

• potentially allow the user to associate their reddit account with the instance so comments etc can proliferate without bot recognition.

The other suggestion would be:

• set up trackers for major (and newly popular) subreddits, tag posts by priority, and use this set of posts to determine what content and types of content are missing, but don't just automatically post everything as the spam problem gets out of hand.

Finally, my biggest gripe with my Lemmy use is the constant instance wars.

I have had my comments removed for being rightfully critical of Israel by lemmy.world mods. They appear intent on recreating the problems of reddit here.

As a developer for a Lemmy app, recently I've felt Lemmy become more and more fragmented resulting in a poorer than usual user experience. And the base user experience is already poor. I'm mostly just venting but man is the fragmentation annoying to deal with as a developer and as a user. :/

I posted in an ADHD community about how I'm fed up with managing my symptoms and I think I finally need to talk to a professional. Someone tried to blame my symptoms on capitalism.

As someone who simply left Reddit because they took away RIF and only stays here because I'm stubborn, Lemmy is the left wing version of Truth Social. A great deal of the users here are the absolute embodiment of the people from Sanfrancisco in South Park huffing each others farts about how progressive they are.

Like, I get it and I do agree in principle on most things with Lemmy which is the only reason I dont leave, but make no mistake THE FEDIVERSE IS AN ECHO CHAMBER.

Look, this is my filter list:

Because i don't want to deal with depressing politics every day in my off time.

And this is what i still see:

Maybe a tagging system would help?

I completely agree. To attract more users, you not only have to create higher quality content, but also content that elicits an emotional response from users, as they well know at Reddit. On Reddit, it is bots that are constantly posting controversial topics. On Lemmy, fortunately, it is humans who can participate in more controversial discussions to attract more humans. For me, as a Linux and Firefox user, controversial discussions include comparisons between Windows vs Linux, Firefox vs Chrome, etc.