In other places on around the web, (chiefly /r/RedditAlternatives) whenever Lemmy is brought up, invariably I see the exact same complaints from brand new accounts.
Lemmy is too complicated, it wont gain traction, can’t figure out how to use it, can’t log in, etc.
Now, I’m definitely more tech savvy than the average redditor, but I just don’t see the complaints. You can go to any Lemmy site, instantly start doomscrolling with a familiar UI, and sign up on all the instances I’ve tried has been frankly more simple than making a new reddit account. The only real complaint I have is the generally smaller volume of users and posts.
My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.
Ideally, the first link someone sees when googling Lemmy would be a global feed on a fairly generic instance, with a basic tagline akin to ‘front page of the internet.’ End users don’t need to care about the technical details, at least not until they’re interested in the platform.
So is this “Lemmy is too confusing” sentiment even real? And if not, what motive would there be to astroturf this?
If it is a real issue affecting would-be users, how can we address it?
When I first signed up here, or tried to sign up here, join-lemmy just didn’t want to load anything. So I ended up going to bed and trying again the next morning. The next morning, it finally loaded the list of instances and going by the experience I had just had with the website battling to even load anything, I chose an instance advertised as “join here to reduce load on larger instances”. And this instance just didn’t want to load anything properly. Half of the images in posts just weren’t showing up. And when I searched LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, only dead communities showed up and I’m pretty sure nothing from Blåhaj.
Then I went to world and still found it to be a ghost town. Eventually I realised that it was because ‘English’ wasn’t selected in my language settings. Because I didn’t realise that you have to ctrl click to select both ‘undefined’ and ‘English’. I’ve used software where you have to ctrl click but I’m not sure I’ve ever come across another website where this is the case. And on this note, the whole fact that ‘undefined’ even exists as an option comes across as bush league and makes it look like a beta version.
Then there’s another issue here. The god damn internal politics. So someone signs up on the insurance that says “focused on programming and development”, then have everyone calling them a tankie or be cut off from multiple instances that have de-federated. It’s clear to me now that ‘ml’ stands for “Marxist Leninist” but when you’re new here and just looking at descriptions in join-lemmy, it just looks like a unique url like all the others.
Personally I think there’s a lot of reasons that people would give up trying to get started here. That’s before even trying to break them ice with a silly question in AskLemmy and getting snarky snark and smart asses in the replies. And I use that as an example because in my first week here, I saw someone post an innocent question in AskLemmy, get hostility as a response, then leave.
The English + Undefined issue is indeed a nasty issue that makes half of the content disappear for a reason that’s not easy to figure out. It really should be a separate checkbox of whether to show or hide posts where the language is not labelled. I do think that Undefined is selected by default now, but might still get unselected if the language setting is clicked and changed.
For those people saying “Ctrl+Click, should be obvious”, that won’t work at all on mobile web UI.
There are language settings? I signed up through the voyager app and I didn’t see any language settings, is that why I can’t see anything other laguages?
This is the standard behaviour on the web for lists where you can select multiple options. See the example here for instance: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/select#advanced_select_with_multiple_features
Most sites have a custom version though, since the built-in HTML element has such a poor user experience. I really wish browsers would just switch it to be a list with checkboxes.
The behaviour was based on Windows desktop apps in the 90s (where this behaviour was way more common), but after a while, most things switched to checkbox lists instead.
Ah, so that’s why it was chosen as the default here.
Yeah I don’t think the multi-select listboxes have really changed much since the days of Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape Navigator. Out of all the standard form components you can use in HTML, it’s probably the one most in need of improvements.