Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
Where they are is having spent most of their life in a walled garden corporate internet. What you need to understand is that all new things have a learning curve, and the process of learning needs to be accepted - rather than trying to pressure free systems into being the very thing everyone is wanting to get away from.
Freedom means having choice. Sometimes a lot of it. Sometimes that's scary. But it's worth embracing.
If any of that were true there wouldn't be posts and comments here and elsewhere from professional programmers who gave up on the registration process because of bad UX. I was one of them. People don't give up on registering here because it's "scary".
If you're one of the many people here happy for this to remain a niche for tech people then that's different.
If somebody gave up on the registration, how would you know? They wouldn't be here to say it.
If you gave up on the registration, then how are you here? You're inventing impossible physics to support your arguments. Are you a professional programmer for doge?
Here's what your expert opinion is really about:
"If somebody gave up on the registration, how would you know?" Because although I have an account here on Lemmy I can still see discussions on comparable sites.
"If you gave up on the registration, then how are you here?" Because I came back a year later after coming across a good explainer for how the fediverse works.
I'm not going to look at that link.
Then I'll just quote it directly:
"Here’s what all these complaints about federation choices reminds me of: every job I’ve ever had, new people get hired from time to time. What do they do? Long before they’ve had any time to get any training or learn how things work to maybe get a better understanding of why some things are done the way they are - day one, they start complaining about all kinds of little things, waxing fantastical about how they’d do things differently. Same energy.
Nothing is perfect, and maybe things can be improved in a number of ways as time goes on. But also everything has a learning curve, so maybe try learning that curve before making demands about getting rid of the core elements that make federation what they are."
That's the thing: no matter how well a system is designed, there will always be a subset of people who find it confusing and frustrating. I've seen Facebook users who refuse to touch reddit because it makes no sense to them. People who never "got" Twitter. Hell, I love digging into operating system environments and learning how they work, and even I ragequit Apple devices every time I touch them - systems whose design is the most celebrated in the tech world.
Learning new things is just uncomfortable, and there will always be people who refuse to do it.
But the fediverse is here, and despite your gatekeeping attitude about it "never being adopted by the masses" because it doesn't follow your personal views; it is growing just fine. New users come and go every day. New systems get federated regularly. Maybe a different reddit clone than lemmy will prove to be the most favored one? Who knows. But it's doing just fine, one day at a time. And it's open-source, so if you don't like it, then code something about it.
Championing for accessibility is the opposite of gatekeeping, no? And coding doesn't solve everything. At the moment, the perfect Lemmy instance could be coded and nobody might find it given the plethora of existing ones. Anyway, we disagree and that's okay.