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.
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I have nothing to add except I hope you’re still enjoying Lord of the Rings.
I do, although the sections in Mordor are a bit tedious to get through. But its worth it for all the details that were left out of the movies.
Thank you for this post and encouragement. I am open to volunteering my time and talents to help people find Lemmy.
However, after the work is done, it would be fantastic if you all could invest in advertising. I know that Google and Bing aren’t great but if I had to guess, search trend for “reddit alternatives” is probably rising and Lemmy is in a great spot to provide reddit refuges a life raft.
Let’s all be clear, Reddit is part of the surveillance state.
You can’t log in without Google and Apple trackers being allowed. New Reddit has recapcha trackers on every page. Only old.reddit doesn’t track what you see, just what you write.
Your thoughts and content belong to a publicly traded company focused on profits if you use reddit.
I don’t have much to say, but thank you for working on lemmy all these years.
I can complain about it a lot sometimes, but I’m very grateful for both the communities and the developers that kickstarted the fediverse, and for free too! So, thank you ❤️
If you or other people want to discuss the development of fedisoftware for beginners, or just growing as a whole you and everyone else are more than welcome at !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com!
Easier
If choosing a server and signing up is too “hard” for someone, then I’d rather they stay on Reddit.
Can Lemmy benefit from your suggestions, definitely. But the easy vs hard structure to these types of conversations feel a lot like the shopping cart dilemma.
It’s not that it’s “too hard”, it’s that even a tiny set back for something that someone is already hesitant to do can be enough to make them not do it. It’s just easier to call that “hard” or “confusing” than say “even a tiny set back for something that someone is already hesitant to do can be enough to make them not do it.”
Then they don’t want to be here. Part of the reason this community is so great is because it’s fueled by those who actively want to participate in a place like this. It doesn’t have to be a place for everyone to be the best place for those here.
