As a general rule, the onboarding and discovery in the fediverse is pretty bloody terrible.

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.

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."

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

Discovering communities is easily the #1 complaint, I don't think it's a technical issue, it feels mostly a conceptual issue with how everything works. I understand why duplicate communities exist because of how the Fediverse works, but in practice it's pretty annoying to the users. For example I tried to look for an anime community just to see if there's any discussion, but I had no idea where people were.

There's anime@lemmy.ml, this looks like the most popular but it's mostly repost bots. There's anime@lemmy.world and ani_me@lemmy.world, both of which barely have users. There's anime@kbin.social, which has some threads going on but few users.

Because of the amount of duplicates nobody knows where the users actually are. Since everyone's confused, nobody participates because they feel like nobody else is going to see their content. On Reddit you had one definitive subreddit for each topic, on Lemmy it feels like a guessing game at times which one's the right one.

We're settling into communities more as time goes on (like how !moviesandtv@lemmy.film is the definitive movie/tv hub), but I think we've got a ways to go. If Lemmy wants to go more mainstream it needs to tackle this, whether it's through multi-reddit style communities that combines feeds or some way to combine comments on crossposts or maybe some other way.

Its just super unattractive to join. If I am thinking about joining a platform I want to know if there is content that is interesting to me. Now if I go to https://join-lemmy.org/ what do I see? It greets me with explanations of the Licensing, tells me all the programming languages and frameworks, shows me pictures of code and something about mod tools and of course immediately offers me to run my own server. None of that is even remotely interesting to me even now that I am a registered user. Not to mention that the design is questionable. Then it says "Join a server". I am not here to join a server, I am here to join a platform. And if I click on that I am met with about 50 different instances, of which I have no idea what to choose and what implications my choice has.

The whole federation thing, the design, everything is just unintuitive and unattractive to join.

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?

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.

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 people

I 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.

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.

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.

Multiple communities with the same theme in diverse servers mean lots of repeated information in my home page.

I find hard to find new niche communities. All is all, the common denominator. My home is what I already have subscribed. Local instance communities are there. But I don know a good way to get offended content from communities outside of those categories.

The same problem I have when it comes to Mastodon/Misskey/Firefish - I feel like everything is so fragmented, like I have to jump from one place to another. Thankfully, this applies significantly less in the "threadiverse" (Outdated name, we definitely need a new one) because there aren't 6 different platforms and tens of different forks, and Lemmy and Kbin are pretty much 100% compatible with one another, unlike those moments where you can't see Mastodon re-toots on Firefish a lot of the time or sometimes accounts' posts appear much later in a different instance. We don't need to worry about that here.

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-community to my-instance.pub/c/cool-community@some-other-instance.pub automatically.

Onboarding is unclear for people. So if they just Google Lemmy it's a bit of a adventure for them to figure out they have to make an account where to make the account.

The friction around account creation is difficult. Many let me instances require manual approval, so that slows down me onboarding funnel.

Let's be Frank most people don't want to make an account, entering email and password and validation. Using some federated identity like Google Apple would make The onboarding easier for people

Discovery is very difficult, especially if you're on a smaller instance, you have to know what communities to individually subscribe to. There's some mitigations with find a Lemmy community websites but they're not built into most of the apps yet. So unless you're joining a very large server, Lemmy's going to feel pretty empty.

There's some gaps between Lemmy and other platforms around media rich posts, especially videos and GIFs. Posting a video on Lemmy is difficult especially if you're on a mobile device.

I still love Lemmy, these are just observations with respect to your query

Even finding Lemmy was not easy. Just doing a search brought up Lemmy from Motörhead. Talented guy, but not really what I wanted. It took me awhile before I even found an instance, and that was only because of a YT video. Most folks will just use the first page of their chosen search engine, and then give up.

Then signing up to… pretty much anything federated is a confusing experience for new users. Trying to wrap your head around instances, communities, and so on. “Why does there have to be an XYZ community at Example instance, when there already is one on ABC Instance? Can’t they just merge? What’s the point? What if I want to be a part of example instance, but want to subscribe to communities on the ABC instance?“

When signup is done, but you then enabled 2FA. You input the string on your app, click apply. Then when you try to log back in, you find you’re logged out, and don’t know why. It’s because Lemmy is one of the few services to use SHA256, and not SHA1. So it doesn’t work with something like Bitwarden. I had to find a GitHub post to find out why this was happening. Not a good first impression.

Then when you subscribe to communities they’re either lacking in content, or reposting, sometimes from another instance.

There seems to be issues with posting media, and the whole integration with other ActivityPub seems to need some work.

Overall I think all this is growing pains. I wouldn’t say the service is ready, but I don’t think it’ll be ready, until it onboards new users. However I don’t think many new users (non-technical users especially) will stay, due to the issues above.