As I watch The Internet look like it’s starting to adopt a new phase (let’s call it federation writ large), I’m watching for signs of both success and struggle. I have some strong opinions of features and functionality lacking in the current suite of UIs that might help adoption, but thing I’ve been thinking about more...
The number of communities doesn’t matter if the UX is too complicated.
Look at Reddit, it has an increadible number of communities and users, yet for the user it is fairly simple to navigate, you can easily link communities by prefixing /r/ to the community name in a reddit post.
Lemmy communities on the other hand use a far more complex link structure: !asklemmy
That is a huge barrier of entry for normal users, then we have user links:
This is just plain annoying to most non technical users, and will push them away.
Lemmy is just teetering on the edge of being too hard to use, for technical users it can be hard to learn, but for normal users, it can be too much to even look at the communities, let alone, creating a new user.
[Long post] Do more or fewer communities lead to increased engagement?
As I watch The Internet look like it’s starting to adopt a new phase (let’s call it federation writ large), I’m watching for signs of both success and struggle. I have some strong opinions of features and functionality lacking in the current suite of UIs that might help adoption, but thing I’ve been thinking about more...