Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
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?
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Could have auto versus manual server choice. Can always maintain option for granular selection for those who want, but "normies" could walk into a quiz when migrating?
And then calculates a server that meets needs, if multiple, then random number generator to assign a server from the filtered options. On user side, all they see is a quiz followed by a typical registration screen. This would help with distribution of users across niche servers, but feel lighter for user. They also would assume a more curated experience, regardless of where they end up. Servers could have to opt in to be fed users from search of they were afraid of impact on cost to maintain server.
The above likely aren't the right questions, but this framework could be effective
Somebody will have to host that. Whether it's a Lemmy app developer, or baked into the Lemmy codebase itself.
Baked in would be nicer. It would kind of cool for any landing page just kind of working to get you into the threadiverse. If I keep going to nomoreuserlemmy.org (or whatever fake one you want) it just redirects on the backend for me when I log in to an instance that actually works for me.
The lemmy servers could also provide how much headroom they have for extra users and the selection wouldn be weighed based on that so that smaller servers wont be overloaded and larger servers get enough users. They could implement some of this into the lemmy api itself.
Good point
The problem with that is there is no centralized website you go to for Lemmy. The closest thing to that would be the various apps you use for Lemmy so my question would be where would you put this quiz? I think when people talk about joining a server being hard it's just hard for people used to a centralized social media to get used to the idea that one social media platform can be made up of a bunch of different websites and it becomes overwhelming to even figure out where to go. They're very used to just going to reddit's website so if they can't just look up Lemmy and click the first link to join it's gonna be too complex.
Sure, the app that nailed this might separate itself as the popular option for zeitgeist to grab onto, but then it distributes users to many servers (as the app itself is an aggregator that's agnostic to server. But yes, rush of that single app becoming "Lemmy" in many people's minds.
But you likely need to treat migration and understanding nuance of the tech as two different user journeys. Rather than solving problem though, likely better to stop and ask why we even want more users (if we even do?).
Just go to https://discuss.online/, easy. :-)