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?

  • isaacd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7710·
    8 hours ago

    This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s

    • Octagon9561@lemmy.mlEnglish
      232·
      7 hours ago

      People these days look weird at you if don’t use Gmail so you can’t see their Google Calendar invite or some other thing that only works with Google… People are literally pushing tech monopolies.

      • Glitchvid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        51·
        6 hours ago

        I still see lots of different emails out there, outlook/hotmail is still huge, yahoo occasionally, icloud in the US.

        Among my techy friend circle all of us have either our own self hosted mail, a ‘privacy’ company email, or something in the middle.

        All to say, I don’t think it’s that uphill of a battle for the very large percentage of Internet users to accept the way federation works.

        • Octagon9561@lemmy.mlEnglish
          4·
          6 hours ago

          I’m a student and don’t know anyone who doesn’t use Gmail here… Guess that’s the result of Google dominating education.

          • Glitchvid@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            6 hours ago

            At what level? I get a student email from my college (outlook based) as do the professors, though communication is primarily through Canvas. So that’s what I see most often in that context.

            I think a lot of people have Gmail incidentally for things like YouTube and other Google account stuff, very few people know you can even bring your own mail.

    • fireweed@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      4 hours ago

      At no point has Gmail ever said “we’re no longer allowing you to send/receive emails to/from Hotmail” or has Yahoo said “we’re maintained by a single volunteer who because of real life stuff can no longer continue so we’re discontinuing our email service.”

      • Gayhitler@lemmy.mlEnglish
        31·
        6 hours ago

        It’s the same thing.

        Email even has its own version of federation and de federation in dkim.

        The only difference is that you’re oftentimes not given access to an email address from your internet provider by default anymore so you’re not automatically joined into the system.

        People balking at choosing a server are not showing you a bad user experience, they’re showing that they don’t really want to be part of a reddit alternative.

        And the broader lemmy/activitypub/whatever needs to figure out if it wants to be like beehaw and hexbear and abandon the shape of reddit or if it wants to duplicate it and try to compete with reddit.

        • AnonomousWolf@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          1·
          5 hours ago

          Email is well established and has incredible UX.

          Email wasn’t competing with a well established centralised version of Email with a vastly superior UX when it was trying to gain users.

          Lemmy doesn’t exist in a vacuum

          • Gayhitler@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            5 hours ago

            Using email is the worst experience in the world. There’s no security, no standard for quotes, no delivery guarantee, a patchwork of attachment deliverability guidelines and you have to understand things like bcc in order to not commit bizarre faux-pas all the time.

            Email sucks and I can’t believe a person who wants to have a conversation about ux would seriously hold it up as a positive example.

            Email literally replaced messaging held in shared files between time users of mainframes. It replaced the most centralized system imaginable which had a ux that required no additional understanding or training of a mainframe user. Twenty years after its inception, major universities still had to have special training classes to make sure students and faculty could use email.

            The problem of people not joining lemmy/activitypub isn’t the ux of choosing a server. The problem is no one wants to leave reddit enough to do so. Lemmy doesn’t offer anything except possibly the same experience as being on some idealized version of reddit so why would users flock to it?

            A better approach would be try to be a better platform than reddit like reddit was to digg, like digg was to slashdot etc. that’s what hexbear and beehaw do.