In my opinion, there are two big things holding Lemmy back right now:
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Lemmy needs DIDs.
No, not dissociative identity disorder, Decentralized Identities.
The problem is that signing up on one instance locks you to that instance. If the instance goes down, so does all of your data, history, settings, etc. Sure, you can create multiple accounts, but then it's up to you to create secure, unique passwords for each and manage syncing between them. Nobody will do this for more than two instances.
Without this, people will be less willing to sign up for instances that they perceive "might not make it", and flock for the biggest ones, thus removing the benefits of federation.
This is especially bad for moderators. Currently, external communities that exist locally on defederated instances cannot be moderated by the home-instance accounts. This isn't a problem of moderation tooling, but it can be (mostly*) solved by having a single identity that can be used on any instance.
*Banning the account could create the same issue.
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Communities need to federate too.
Just as instances can share their posts in one page, communities should be able to federate with other, similar communities. This would help to solve the problem of fragmentation and better unify the instances.
Obviously there are plenty of bugs and QoL features that could dramatically improve the usage of Lemmy, but these two things are critical to unification across decentralized services.
What do you think?
EDIT: There's been a lot (much more than I expected) of good discussion here, so thank you all for providing your opinions.
It was pointed out that there are github issues #1 and #2 addressing these points already, so I wanted to put that in the main post.
I mean ...
That's active users last month. Roughly +50% or +10k in less than a week.
So the data seems to strongly speek against it; lemmy gets more users just fine despite being so difficult.
One question is how many of those will leave again. And obviously, we should strive to make it more user friendly. I fully support your proposals. I just don't think it's right to paint them as a necessity for growth, they evidently aren't.
The reality is that reddit still exists, and is still more user-friendly (and that's a low bar). It's great that lemmy is getting this bump, but it won't last unless we make it easy to switch for most people. If lemmy was good enough to be a reddit alternative already, it would be. But it's not, and the only reason people are here is because of the protest.
I think I'm just not that worried about making it easy for "most people" right now. The nature of open source projects means that enthusiastic users can and do contribute to infrastructure, and as more people come along, more people will start working on making things better. There's a reason reddit decided to fuck over third party API calls, and its because open source projects became better than their own shit, and they apparently think that they're losing potential money because of it. Projects like Apollo would not be getting cut off if they weren't seen as a threat to reddit's business model. If lemmy survives, the breadth and depth of community driven infrastructure will outpace reddit eventually. If it doesn't, well... then somebody will try something else. No biggie. Cool shit takes time to build.
That makes total sense. I hope to contribute sometime :)
That's a damned good point!
Yep – it shouldn't have to take a mass exodus from reddit with a specific push for Lemmy/kbin to get these registrations. Without the support of so many other people doing it, most wouldn't have had the initiate to figure it out, I suspect. Improving accessibility and user friendliness will be important for sustained growth when reddit protests are finished or shut down by admins.
We're mostly on the same page. reddit will continue to exist (although time will tell in which state).
I got hung up on the statement "It won’t get more users if it continues to be difficult to use", because it is evidently false, unnuanced. I still want lemmy to implement these features, as it would help growth (and mostly, the individual users) even further.
It is a somewhat reductive statement, I'll give you that, but I think the core idea is true. Most people will go to the easiest solution. Lemmy's userbase may continue to grow for some time, but it will not reach anywhere close to the level of reddit. I think it's foolish to point to the trends from the last week and try to draw conclusions about the future, as this is clearly an extraordinary circumstance.
Yes, for sure. Maybe we simply have different standards about truthful statements. I did not mean to imply lemmy could grow like that forever. I just pointed out that it does in a moment when you said it could not, that's all.
In what way is reddit more user-friendly?
One account gives you access to all the communities?
Years of UI/UX development (arguably, both are bad, but still more developed than anything Lemmy has)?
Easily navigate a user's post- and comment history?
Space for more specialised communities due to larger user base?
More, and more experienced, mods due to larger user base?
I'm sure we could play this game all day. I guess it depends on whether you see each instance as an individual "Reddit", or see Lemmy as a fractured "Reddit" with big chasms that need separate accounts to be successfully bridged.
Personally, I see Lemmy as potentially being the latter. Having one Lemmy account (or maybe even one ActivityPub account) would allow me to subscribe to the communities I'm interested in, without having to worry about whether those communities are federated with each other. The instance mods can still de/federated how they feel they need to, in order to make their mod tasks manageable.
If BeeHaw still wants a manual application process for vetting purposes, it shouldn't matter if I'm asking for permission to create an account, or asking for permission to bring in my already existing account. Instance mods can still gatekeep to the exact level that they want.
Twelve of those are mine, due partly to the very shortcomings being discussed here.