- Exclude explicit software bugginess or missing features
- Include experiences or knock-on effects that may have arisen from (1)
- Comparisons to Reddit are ok. We know the reasons for the differences, but this is just about expressing yourself
As a general rule, the onboarding and discovery in the fediverse is pretty bloody terrible.
It has to exist to be terrible.
The “front page” of lemmy, either the local of the instance you’re on or the “all”, is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I’m not sure what the issue is with lemmy’s front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?
It’s too bad because the “front page” is the user’s first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.
In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.
Lemmy has no algorithm.
Something has to choose what shows up on hot.
That’s not really what I was referring to. Sure it selects posts automatically but it’s not like it picks what it thinks a specific user is going to click on.
I think the original commenter was referring to how Reddit was able to balance popular communities and smaller ones instead of the fire hose of memes and tech news Lemmy is.
but it is just a simple vote count/time decay, no consideration given to what you have interacted with in the past, ie the “algorithm” on other platforms
That’s why the content isn’t sorted as well as it could be. There’s no one-size-fits-all for social media as people have different things they like.
Yes there is, and it’s not that different from reddit. The sorting algorithm is what they refer to. Eg, hot is some balance of time vs votes, which greatly favours newer posts (too new, IMO – posts it shows will typically no comments or maybe just one or two). Active favours high commenting rates and based on my observations, it seems to drop off around 2 days (too old, IMO – a considerable number of posts shown by this algorithm seem to be around the 2 day mark). The top and new algorithms are straightforward enough.
All the algorithms favour big communities. There’s a “best” algorithm in development, which would try to look at the top for each community and thus give smaller communities a chance. I can’t wait for that, because right now, you’ll rarely if ever see a small community hit the front page and it sucks bad.
I strongly agree that it needs to improve. Besides the sorting algorithm issues, one issue is that “all” depends on what people on your instance have subscribed to. So small instances might not have much or have a very biased all. I think Lemmy should at least default to basically subscribing to the N biggest communities for all instances, purely to seed the “all” view.
As well, most instances should default to “all”, because “local” is usually going to be extremely limited and misleading. Defaulting to local will just make the fediverse look bad. New users aren’t going to realize they can switch to all. They’ll just think there’s barely any content and leave.
The worldnews thing is the biggest problem right now because the threads just get brigaded so consistently. And lemmy.ml, which has one of the biggest worldnews forums, has a soft ban on the world’s biggest ongoing news story.
The front page of Reddit is one of the places I’ve actively avoided. That’s the place where I’ll find everything that the rest of the world likes to see, but none of the stuff that I care about. I tend to be interested in strange niche topics, and my multireddits reflected that quite clearly. To me, the front page of Lemmy is about as boring as the front page of Reddit, so no big changes there.
Yeh for the last few years especially of my using Reddit I would only ever go directly to the 4-5 subs that I frequented. Never once went to the home page/“all”, or the new discover page or whatever it is.
For now I’m using All on here to try and find some communities to join, and which ones to block. I’d say in a few months I’ll just be using Subscribed.
In order to discover interesting places I just went to https://lemmyverse.net/communities and joined every community with an interesting name, such as science, technology, physics etc.
Some sorting would be good. I’d also like to be able to hide posts without having to block the poster. Right now there is very little user control.
The way communities are federated. They are still centralised. The Usenet/Fidonet model (where the communities were distributed) from decades ago was superior (the communities themselves don’t have a depenency on a single instance). While the Usenet model would require a bit more work to implement particularly around identity/moderation, it would make the system so much more resilient.
Loads more unnecessary and weird political comments on completely unrelated posts. On Reddit it depended much more on the subreddit whether you’ll get those weird comments, on Lemmy I found lots of comments up high on various non-political communities which just repeat certain political combat slogans on many posts.
Even when I sympathize with ‘that side’ moreso than the opposite one, it’s just dumb and annoying to me.
For me, you can’t separate those two things. I want an online identity. I don’t want to switch servers because of whatever reason and have to import bookmarks. I want my app to keep track of my subscriptions and just give me my replies/messages. I don’t want to care whether I’m on lemmy.ml or whatever
Have my upvote good sir/madam/other. Use it in good health!
It’s “starting off” by being flooded with admins and mods* from reddit, many of which didn’t listen to their communities and were power hungry. Lemmy today is basically reddit 2.0 but with growing pains and teething issues.
Mods and admins will always be like this, this is not a Reddit thing. The trouble is the people who want to moderate a community are the type who generally “want the power”. It’s a people not a technology issue and unfortunately not one that can be solved.
Could you say some examples? I’ve seen a lot of people mention they’re ex mods, but haven’t seen any moderation issues yet.
Do you mean admins or mods?
Sorry I meant to say admins and mods.
No worries, just clarifying. It would’ve been happy news if the admins were leaving their overlords.
There shouldn’t be votes. Activitypub itself shouldn’t have votes but I can understand the broader community around it wanting them to kludge in functionality of places they’re trying to ape.
If you’re coming from Reddit or wherever though and don’t see this as a perfect opportunity to get rid of the part of the site all the problems stem from or are enabled by, I don’t know what to say.
Get rid of the votes.
I like this…upvote! 😁
Hell yeah!
Hey everybody, come prove electoralism works!
How do you sort the content without votes? How do you pick out the good stuff from the spam?
You read it and when it’s good you respond with a contribution or expansion on the ideas presented.
Maybe you quote the post but write nothing, or put an emoji nodding and smiling and pointing at the quoted text.
When something’s spam you either ignore it or tell that person to fuck off. Maybe you report their posts, then a mod drops in and confirms that they should fuck off and either gently corrects them or bans them with whatever level of granularity is appropriate.
Are you willing to accept the assumption that bad content (e.g., spam, advertising, trolling, low effort posts) is far more common than good content (I.e…, high effort posts)?
If you are, then it seems to me that your system would involve a lot more people interacting with a lot more bad content than they do good content. Down votes are a mechanism that let’s one person’s time wasted interacting with bad content reduce the probability that everyone else will have to waste their time on that content.
No, that assumption is wrong. That phenomenon didn’t become common and problematic until systems to remove the human element were put in place. Like voting.
Think of the forum you go to for your niche hobby. No, not the subreddit or lemmy !, the forum with all those old guys (they are guys for my hobby) with signatures that have pictures of their pets and Miata and a proud listing of the equipment they use to do their thing. Do those places have problems with spam, advertising, trolling or low effort posts?
Of course not! Spam gets removed, advertising is relegated to the buy/sell/trade subforum, trolling is accepted or moderated out based on the community’s preference and ditto for posting effort.
Votes are very important if you’re trying to create a system that encourages a parasocial relationship between users. If you don’t want to encourage a parasocial interaction then there’s not much reason for votes.
Interesting perspective. Thanks for genuinely engaging, by the way.
I worry that the mechanisms you describe might not work as the number of users gets large. Check out “Eternal September” if you don’t know about it already. Niche forums might be able to run like that just because they will never have too many members. For forums which many people are interested in (e.g., cat memes), this might not be possible. They may need a mechanism for high-grading content.
forgive me for swinging at the low hanging fruit, but:
if only there were some system that allowed users to switch to different servers when they get tired of the one theyre on.
september was a problem on usenet because it was a huge platform everybody was on. the structure of federated systems is inherently secure from septembers of yore and behaves like old forum splits. look at whats happening on world right now, it’s having problems and people are leaving for other servers.
if all of facebook for example suddenly got sprayed onto a federated system, people who didn’t want to be around that would just move to servers that enforced their norms or didn’t federate with the newbies.
there is no need for content grading unless we just want to have that particular “internet as tv” parasocial relationship.
Fair enough, but that still doesn’t address the problem for people who do want to be on a large server—full of many people who share their cat meme interests—and see mostly high quality content.
Wanting to be in a forum with thousands or millions of other enthusiasts is a legitimate use case for this kind of social media platform. In that use case, I don’t know of any other way but voting to efficiently filter low quality content. “Just leave” avoids the problem rather than solving it, by denying people the opportunity to do the thing that most people go to Reddit for: to be part of huge communities and just see the good threads and comments.
IMHO, It’s fine as long as there’s no account wide Reddit-style karma.
Is it fine the way it’s implemented, with no vote anonymity?
No, I don’t think so, but that’s a different aspect.
Do you think the issues with voting (Samey content, lowkey groupthink, manipulation, etc) are acceptable if there was some technical solution to vote anonymity?
Are you sure the issues you mentioned are caused by voting? I’m not certain, so I cannot answer your question.
I without a doubt am.
its not the only cause but its absolutley why reddit ended up so uniquely bad in those ways. the problems were systemic and voting was a big part of that system.
think on it, you got slashdot, then digg, then reddit. they all try to run with this new method of handling both content and discussion: ranked instead of threaded. slashdot falls apart because digg does it better. digg falls apart because it has the method right, but it’s trying to be legitimate news. reddit gets huge because it recognizes the ranked model is for social media as opposed to news and leans into it with all the bells and whistles. idk if reddit falls apart.
the canaries leave reddit for the fediverse and start lemmy. but why keep the things that made reddit bad?
In my opinion, the problems you mentioned are not caused by the voting system.
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Groupthink is caused by a lack of discipline. Obvious hot takes or otherwise poorly formulated comments should be downvoted. Well presented contrarian opinions should be upvoted. Perhaps educating users on using the system in its intended way – promoting healthy debate or interesting insight – is better than removing the system completely.
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Manipulation is caused by poor bot control, so while removing voting might help somewhat, this would be a band-aid at most. Unless you mean some sort of psyop manipulation that doesn’t involve automation, which voting can, in theory at least, help against by refuting attempts at manipulation.
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Duplicated content I have only seen in connection to the nature of the fediverse so far (i.e., same topic communities spread across multiple large instances). I guess some people would try to farm internet points by posting low quality content, but if people like that content and vote for it, what’s there to be done apart from blocking the community you don’t like?
Also Lemmy’s popularity would suffer if it was missing one of the key features of Reddit (“Full vote scores (+/-) like old Reddit.” is listed as one of the main features on the official website).
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Also, Boosts in Kbin are more effective than upvotes but it’s not obvious to a person who isn’t aware of that
I don’t have anywhere to discuss reality TV bullshit now :( Reddit was good for that. I just want to know if Charity sent the right guy home tonight and I haven’t found a community for that yet.
100%
The comments are too long.
It has sort of been said already, but I didn’t find a reply stating my exact criticism so I’ll chime in. Lemmy and the fediverse is confusing. Instances, federation, de-federating, and all the other techno-garble is not something most internet users have any frame of reference for and I imagine it is very off-putting to a vast majority of potential users.
I’m not usually one to harp on user experience but it’s just a mess trying to get into this whole thing. I was driven by a hatred for reddit to figure it out and I’m a software developer by trade, but still was scratching my head at wtf all these terms were and how it all works. Lemmy and the fediverse desperately needs some onboarding/marketing work and to ditch this sentiment of “if you can’t figure it out then we don’t want you here.”
I tried to explain it to my parents this past weekend, and I did not do a good job (because I only like 70% get it in the first place).
I do want to mention that despite what I said above, I think apps are doing a good job at making exploration kinda easier. Been digging wefwef/voyager and looking forward to Boost and Sync to check out.
Agreed, though I think it’s less “we don’t want you here” and more “you’re on your own”. I liken it to Linux in that sense where new users are expected to try harder to learn the ins and outs. The difference is with Linux what you learn can be applied in so many more places in your Linux experience. With Lemmy, once you grasp the technical depth of it there’s not much you can do with it except explain it to another person.
100%. Mass adoption really needs “easy”. From an average user experience, Reddit is instantly useable.
Links between instances often don’t work as intended, and there’s no good way to redirect me from
some-other-instance.pub/c/cool-communitytomy-instance.pub/c/[email protected]automatically.This is something we have a workaround on an extension I’m working on. You can right-click on a link and have it open in your home instance
Thanks, this is lovely!
You should check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fediredirect/. This works for redirecting both communities and posts, although the latter requires to give your log in credentials to the extension.
Looks nice. Some us browse on mobile though.
I also mainly browse on mobile haha. However loading posts from my home instance is often taken care of by the app (client).
Thanks, I’ll try it out!
As an old, I just realized why the time I spend on Lemmy is less soul-destroying than equivalent time on Reddit.
I enjoy searching for topics of interest more than being spoonfed content. So in this respect, the difficulty of Lemmy is the point.
I get it that this is an aging hipster point of view, so really we are fighting for the soul of Lemmy.
How much appeal do we really want?
How fast do we want to grow?
What order should major features be implemented in? (Let alone the debate over which features.)
This debate will never end. Get used to the defederation wars. It is akin to “Am I my brother’s keeper”? This is among the first questions asked in Genesis and God declined to answer. We will fight about it till the end of time.
My best hope is that enough quality instances host quality communities that I can curate my own experience to make so-called social media serve me, not a tech company.
I thought that was the point?
Join us at lemmy.world/c/tinnedseafood! Or is it !tinnedseafood. But don’t I need the instance too? This is part of the problem!
This is a feature, not a bug. Yes you need the instance as well as the community name. This is akin to complaining that you can’t type in a URL without including the TLD (*.com, *.org, *.wtevs).
I am open to an explanation how you can expect to find a community without both pieces of information. There may be a less confusing way to structure the links, but the community name and instance name are basically required for a federated system.
The redditors are really racist and really anticommunist sometimes. I get that the admin wants a diversity of opinion but the orientalism feels pretty intense nowadays
Wow. All the top comments are about finding / joining / onboarding.
It’s just super unattractive to join.
Discovering communities is easily the #1 complaint
Onboarding is unclear for peopleI genuinely don’t understand this criticism about the fediverse. It seems like people just want to be told what to do. I totally understand that this isn’t a vertical platform like Reddit or Twitter but that doesn’t prevent anyone from participating in the platform. It just means that you need to look for what you’re interested in rather than be told what you should be interested in.
Multiple communities with the same theme in diverse servers mean lots of repeated information in my home page.
I’ve commented recently about the redundancy of communities - which I think is a related criticism to knowing what community to join (as opposed to instance). If I’m on this instance but another instance has a community of the same name, which should I join? Both? Meh. It’s not something to stand in the way of using the platform at all but it is a bit annoying.
Anyway, my one “complaint” is just that the niche communities I’m a member of on Reddit don’t exist here. Specifically, communities for buying and trading things like r/photomarket.
This is still a relatively new platform. It’s going to take some time for it to build itself organically. It feels to me that a measurable amount of content on the platform is critiquing the platform. I think it would be more conducive if we all spent less time critiquing and more time generating original content - not stuff cross-posted from other platforms. I mean, in general, if you’re searching the web for “a thing”, the results aren’t going to direct you to the fediverse unless you’re specifically searching about something regarding the fediverse. Showing up in search results might be the tipping point that drives more users to join the platform.
It seems like people just want to be told what to do.
Yes exactly. Not many people like to figure out how something works, they just want it to work.
Apple’s success isn’t because it’s the best at any individual feature. It’s successful because All the features just work without having to figure anything out.
Wow. All the top comments are about finding / joining / onboarding.
Then it’s a solid complaint. A quick story as to why you don’t understand it: I use to do tech support and I’d hear so many coworkers get super frustrated about how stupid the people calling in were, because they couldn’t even do…whatever the thing was. I would make a point to the new hires that they knew how to do this stuff because they’re techies, because this is what they grew up learning. The doctor or lawyer or professor on the other end of the call is not stupid whatsoever…in fact, they’re likely much smarter than the person calling them stupid, they just took a different path. The techie is unable to fathom that the depth of their own technical knowledge is not common knowledge whatsoever and takes the basics for granted. At its core is an inability to see one’s self as more than a standard deviation from the norm. Cheers.
I don’t like him either
One thing I’ve noticed that I feel might become an issue eventually is that occasionally someone will have something they really want to be seen, so they sort of cross-post it to every related community in every instance they can all at the same time, so it shows up in your feed a dozen times from a dozen different places and it takes sometimes a day or more to get fully pushed out of the way.
I’ve only seen it happen a few times so far so it’s not currently a major issue, but I can definitely see the potential for abuse there. As more people join you’ll inevitably start to get more of the marketers and influencers and eventually corporations showing up, and they tend to bring all their bots and tools and various ways of gaming the system so it’d suck if the whole feed ends up being just the same 3-4 things posted into dozens of places for the whole day.
I’m sure there are ways to filter those sorts of things out, but I think the challenge is going to be to find a way to keep it under control without putting too much on the user, so they don’t have to be constantly tweaking their settings and blocklists, and so that new users who just browse without having an account yet don’t just see an unappealing wall of nonsense.
Hopefully that doesn’t end up being the case, but that seems to be the way it trends when you add more people in my experience.
I agree that is a vulnerability that will be exploited soon. Not sure the best way to combat it. Perhaps a crossposting limit/cost/penalty would discourage it.
This bears deeper thought though because since there’s no karma (let there never be), new accounts can bypass costs/limits from more permissive instances.
Good point and I hope to see more discussion around this. It actually seems kind of serious now I ponder on it.
It’s already a thing. I scrolled New this morning and it was just a wall of the same story posted all over by some shit bot. This needs to be figured out asap.
Yeah this has to be my number one criticism at the moment. It’s a bit of a catch 22: you want a steady stream of quality content, so you subscribe to multiple communities of the same name so nothing falls through the cracks, and then posters post to multiple related or same-named communities so nobody misses it 🤷♂️
