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?
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Lemmy has good UI, the defaults set are just bad and most people will give up before discovering Photon etc.
Something like https://phtn.app/ really should be the default
Disclaimer: Photon is great and the dev does a fantastic job. Also, the beta is open, please give them feedback on !photon@lemdro.id
However, there as still issues induced by not using the default UI. One of the instances I used added photon as p.instance for a while
Photon was still in early stages, and there was a bug preventing it to load for some people (Firefox users IIRC). In the end the admin switched to Tesseract.
https://lemdro.id/ has photon as a Default, but it took them a while to the latest version, for quite some time it wasn't ideal. I would still go to https://l.lemdro.id/ just because the Comments view was available, or because some other info was missing/hidden.
Lemmy releases new versions quite regularly, and there are usually a few bugs. Photon development is independent, and the Photon dev has to catch-up with those. Add admins sometimes limited availability to the mix and the experience can really become subpar.
There's quite a few things we can do to improve the experience in the current default.
Eg. by optimising it's defaults, turning 'Auto expand media' on makes it a much smoother transition for people, and makes the site look more modern and not like a forum from 15 years ago.
The reality is, our UX is bad else top comments in the post I shared wouldn't look like that, and something needs to be done about it
What proportion of the potential new joiners are going to use the web UI compared to an app like Sync, Thunder or Arctic?
Not many I'm assuming. I like pointing people to Voyager because it's both on android and apple, and it has a very smooth UX, you can install and start scrolling
My message is often something like
` Checkout Lemmy, it's a solid reddit alternative. https://phtn.app/
If you want a mobile app: https://vger.app/settings/install `
Be careful that IIRC Reddit blocked the phtn URL and would automatically remove comments mentioning it.
Not sure if it's still the case now, but just a warning.
Super ui! Kudos
If the UI is the problem, the lemmy devs are working on a more modern looking UI using daisyUI atm.
Agreed. I really like the default UI personally but I know it's not exactly the most new-user-friendly and modern. There is also tesseract: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/communities/lemmy.world
It's all here ? https://phtn.app/_app/immutable/assets/0.CzFg6cYp.css
A theme chooser like misskey allows to do, should'nt be that complicated