The biggest issue with this website is the lack of basic explanation of how it works. Imo, the moment someone visits this website for the first time, a pop-up should appear explaining what this is, and how it works in maybe one simple paragraph at most.
Question; cuz I’ve been using Memmy too, and I haven’t had a chance to read into it much. I don’t have the ability to upvote/downvote/reply to individual comments in the app. I’m not sure if it’s a bug on my end or if he just hasn’t had a chance to implement those features yet. Do you have that same issue with it?
That’s true, that’s why I didn’t file a report right away. I’m sure all of these devs are absolutely inundated with bug reports and feature requests right now.
Ah, you know what...(im still learning too). Apparently if you are viewing content from all instances (like those your account arent signed into), you cannot vote or comment in those posts.
From the outside looking in, the whole model seemed needlessly complicated. So it’s like there’s a LOT of reddit.coms over here? But they’re all the same? But also different? What’s the difference? Which one do I sign up on?
But then I get here and realized it doesn’t really matter that much, since you can more or less use all of them regardless of which one you sign up for.
Something about the way users try to communicate what Lemmy/Fediverse IS, is the complicated part. It’s like everyone wants to jump straight to the more technical details behind how the model works; which probably scares off a lot of the people who just want a place to pop in and talk about their hobbies.
I just told my fairly tech-unsavvy partner the email analogy:
You sign up on Google, I sign up on yahoo, my bro-in-law runs his own from a server in his house. We can all email each other and the email looks mostly the same no matter who reads it, but yahoo isn't Google isn't my bro-in-law. Lemmy = email in general, yahoo = lemmy.ml, Google = lemmy.world, etc.
She immediately got it and has an account on some instance and has subscribed to a bunch of places.
This is probably my favorite analogy for it so far, at least as a high level overview. I kind of made the same connection myself and that’s when it clicked for me.
Yeah, there should be simple "how and where do I sign up and find my favourite communities". I feel like there is lots of tech talk here because lots of tech stuff needs to happen before these sites are ready for the full moderation suit and for supporting the most basic aspects of Reddit communities (like flairs)...
Yeah I think it might be better to explain it like if anyone could boot up their own reddit and link to other people’s reddits. Some are popular, some aren’t, some don’t want to be huge because they want to be niche like some subreddits did. We may have subreddits with the same name but it’s ok because people can tell based on which Reddit it’s on. Also they’re called instances not reddits and communities not subreddits.
The thing that’s weird to me is that say I like football (soccer). I’m sure there are dozens of “instances” have a soccer community, but which one should I follow? It seems like this architecture fragments the user base too much.
I keep seeing people say this but honestly registering is really easy. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to create an account after leaving reddit
I had heard about it for a week, but finally signed up when a mod I trusted on a reddit sub I used posted a sign-up link to lemmy.world. I'm somewhat tech proficient, but that extra step of figuring out a good instance to join was enough to stop me for a while. I didn't want to join a dud and have yet another dead login somewhere. YMMV, of course!
I disagree. At first I was frustrated that people were having so much difficulty with such a simple process, but after a while I adopted the mindset that if they're too stupid to figure out something so mundane then I don't want them here anyway. 🤷♂️
This is the important part. I’m part of the big homebrewing (beer) community on Reddit, as well as some local subs for my home area. I don’t think a ton of those users can figure it out as easily as someone like myself.
It doesn’t really require tech savvy, just a few minutes of reading. Anyone smart enough to have something interesting to add to a conversation can figure it out easily enough.
And sadly, the software seems to be little better than proof of concept quality. It seems poorly architected for functionality, usability and scalability.
Don't get me wrong - I think it is a good start, but there are some significant concerns:
My biggest UX complaint is that the method for connecting to a federated community is just....wrong. Do something completely unintuitive (paste a glyph / URL in search), get an error (not found), wait a while and hopefully it will start working. I can't fathom who thought this was a good idea, and I'm shocked that apparently Mastadon does it the same way. We're losing a lot of interested users at this step.
UX issue #2 - which may be fixed in .8, can't say - is that there is basically no error handling. Any server error or user error results in the spinning wheel of death. Sometimes refreshing fixes it, sometimes it doesn't. For example, did you know there is a 10k post limit? If your post exceeds 10k - you guessed it - spinning wheel of death. Try to sign up with a user ID that's already taken? Spinning wheel of death. Log in without verifying your e-mail? Spinning wheel of death. You get the idea.
I'm not an admin, but apparently that the software isn't really designed for cluster scaling. I think the assumption is that more instances solve scaling. It doesn't.
Functionality wise, there is very little control for mods. Pin, delete, ban. Edit the sidebar. That's it.
These are problems that can be solved, but the next step will be to see where development leadership steers the platform. It is how these problems are solved that will decide whether Lemmy or Kbin becomes the leading platform.
I keep seeing this said about lemmy but kbin was identical to any other site. So I looked up what the process is for lemmy and, aside from like 2 glitches to look out for it was exactly the same.
I think you're right insofar as onboarding is concerned. Once you've registered, though, Lemmy is relatively straightforward to use. Changing your user settings to display posts from ALL federated Lemmy instances on your front page helps with discoverability. That should be the default setting, but it isn't. That setting is associated with the "Type" parameter (found just below "Theme"). It isn't terribly obvious.
Agreed. The difficulty is in the initial discovery step. Early lemmy adopters will often refuse to recommend a specific instance to newcomers. But that confuses people. I know it confused the hell out of me.
My issue was I didn't know where to go to sign up. It took me a little time to understand the fediverse, then I had to figure out what instance I should sign up for. After that I started hearing some instances weren't accepting new accounts but didn't know if that was a thing everywhere or only one instance. I consider myself above average compared to the general public when it comes to my capabilities with the Internet and computer tech in general, it's never taken me days to understand stand how to sign up for a website like this before.
It does seem simple now that I'm here and understand things better. It's just a learning curve; this is unique to any website\forum\whatever I've played with before.
Using 'Active Users' as the metric of growth is much more reliable than the total user count since there have been rashes of instances started up just for spam accounts.
Same for mine! Have two and they are in my grill 100% of the time when I get home. Moving from room to room whenever my wife and I go. Cats can clearly have emotions and do care :)
Oh you mean the cluster bombs banned as war crimes and which we were criticizing Russia for using last year? I think even the ICC was investigating their use by Russia.
The Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) is an international treaty. Russia, Ukraine and the United States didn’t sign on to that treaty. I wish they did.
Nutritious is very relative to industrialized food production. The most nutritious natural products are perceived as wild and are not objects of agriculture. Basically the objects of agriculture were selected on the ease of reproduction, not their nutritious value, or their cost. It just so happened that those that were easy to plant and grow were the leanest in quantity and complexity of nutrients. Many of the most nutritious seeds, fruits, and vegetables are becoming extinct with the elimination of natural forests. Planted forests would take thousands of years to stabilize as ecosystems (if ever) and be concidered sustainable food sources.
Cheap means the industry hasn’t been able to monopolize, but labor is very exploitable (see bannana republics, tea and coffee plantations). It also means the quantities produced have saturated the markets and the product is in abundance (wheat, corn, soy,…).
Delicious … only N.Europeans (and their N.Am. Oceania descendants) would consider eating a single element alone and judge it by taste. The rest of the world eat what they can get, spice it up, mix it, and make taste a final product of a mixture of things with a labor intensive process of preparing it. The dairy industry (waste of nutritients and exponentially waste of land use) and the sugar industry (it should have been banned under substance abuse addictive product that is a health hazzard as well) have blurred what “delicious” really means. Take as an example banana split ice cream, there is little nutritious value, if not harmful as a whole, made of three industrial products that maximize labor exploitation. If it wasn’t for capitalism nobody in their right mind would have come up with this one. It only exists because of capitalism.
Nutrition has been a dead end disaster since its early days of being industrialized.
I don't think feeding has much to do with it. My cat is obsessed with me and looks at me like this all the time, even though my wife feeds him. I don't think he even puts it together that he wouldn't be able to eat without someone feeding him.
What I learned as a glass collector and glassblower is that if you use an item made from a fragile material, it will eventually get broken. The only way to keep such things forever is to put them on a shelf and not use them. If you want to experience it, you must accept that eventually it will be damaged or destroyed.
My (now second) favorite cat broke the handle of my favorite mug the other day. I think I’m gonna fix it with that gold powder laquer method and make it better.
I should do that with this one ceramic cow mug I have!
Unfortunately I had this awesome glass cow cup from meow wolf and it’s so shattered. People would bring me glass when I was a glassblower, like “can you fix this??” and… well, with glue, I guess, but not my melting it back together, usually.
lemmy.world
Hot