I’ve tried both [Lemmy and PieFed], and the UX is incredibly unintuitive and unpleasant. The main problem is that it’s quite hard to discover content you want while avoiding content you don’t, Bluesky at least has really good custom feeds that are easy to add (the default feed sucks). Another big issue is the general site layout, it’s hard to figure out how to do things as simple as saving a post for later or how to go back to the feed without being redirected back to the post I’m trying to exit.
Maybe they didn’t see the “Feeds” feature in PieFed? The top navigation menus in PieFed are a bit messy. Although shareable blocklists could be cool too, or maybe toxic?
That’s excluding the horrible lack of contrast most frontends use, which makes reading and parsing the site elements unnecessarily difficult (no Lemmy, grey text on a grey background is not good for readability).
I like the Lemmy colors, but maybe it should be easier to change, because they might like the darkly-pureblack theme.
Fediverse feels slower, but not in a good way. More of a ‘if I don’t use this for a week, I’ll see new things’. If I log in after 2 or 3 days, I’ll scroll for 10 minutes and see the stuff I saw last time.
Maybe this is a UX issue of not finding the right feed they would like.
I’ve tried using lemmy and have exactly the same issue. After blocking all the politics stuff, left wing meme stuff and tankie stuff there’s bugger all remaining. Even with all the blocks I’ve made it just seems to be a bunch of toxic left wing people calling each other fascist because of some minor difference in opinion.
I also want nsfw stuff now and then. I hate how censored the internet has become, at least with reddit if I want to see a bit of porn, I can.
Again maybe a UX issue of not presenting what communities they could subscribe to.
I tried twice to join those forums within the Fediverse and I can’t get past the captcha test. The fact that you need approval to validate your access doesn’t seem designed to encourage you to recommend it.
The captchas on Lemmy are AWFUL, I can’t do them either.
(that’s the “Medium” difficulty)
Lemmy v1.0 is adding the ability to do invites, so maybe there will be an invite-only instance that gets some momentum, that could be cool. Invite sites seems like a cool old-internet type of culture.
The fediverse stuff is way too complicated for me, Reddit is very easily accessible and actually has active communities for the topics I’m interested in.
Of course these are naturally going to be all negative because they’re users that bounced off the Threadiverse, but there’s probably hints to what can be improved
More of a ‘if I don’t use this for a week, I’ll see new things’. If I log in after 2 or 3 days, I’ll scroll for 10 minutes and see the stuff I saw last time.
I had this exact experience. The solution? Just loud subscribe to stuff and now I have 80 notifications a day about new posts which I struggle to keep up with. Clearly the fediverse isn’t as inactive as I had the impression from just browsing it.
The captchas on Lemmy are AWFUL, I can’t do them either.
Do all Lemmy frontends use those captchas? Might be a reason to recommend a different one by default.
I do have to say, I bounced off Lemmy and Piefed mostly due to their UI and UX. I probably wouldn’t have joined the fediverse if I didn’t come across a kbin.social recommendation back then. Mbin is much more up my alley, though not ideal either, but it has worked out for me so far.
Captchas are served by the server, not a frontend thing. Otherwise they would be pretty useless for spam protection.
I see, makes sense. Didn’t think that far.
This is completely bananas to me, given the Reddit UI…
yea it’s awful but they’re used to it lol
Are they using a 3rd party app like Voyager? It makes a big difference.
maybe but this is accurate
Even with all the blocks I’ve made it just seems to be a bunch of toxic left wing people calling each other fascist because of some minor difference in opinion
lol
most of them no, which is maybe another issue of not showing that’s an option, but really the default UIs need to be good
The reddit UI sucked in the past and sucks more now. The main reason that reddit grew was because of the incredible apps that 3rd parties made like RiF.
Lemmy now has a bunch of mature and efficient apps that are easy to use.
A couple of the apps were even made by reddit app devs that abandoned the platform. So some of the lemmy/piefed apps are literally those remade.
Well, the platform abandoned them.
Blue alien was the one reddit bought it, made it their official app and ruined it
RiF is the worst example possible of better UI and “incredible”, it was always the ugliest and least nice to use reddit app by far, IMO.
I seriously don’t understand how anyone could stand it, it was like trying to use some shitty win95 shovelware compared to most others. Easily one of the ugliest apps I’ve ever seen too.Yes, but it WORKED!
In contrast, I tried out Summit that easily looks to be the most beautiful Lemmy app that I’ve seen, but there were so many times when I had to switch back to the browser web UI to get something done that I gave it up in favor of Voyager.
Which despite being one of the most fully-featured ones, still has a ton of limitations.
I suppose I understand, it’s a chicken and egg problem where app devs don’t want to spend unlimited time working on an app that only like 100 people are ever going to use, while at the same time people aren’t going to come to the Threadiverse if the UI/UX is poor.
I use Voyager and I feel like it’s easy enough to use and has a great UI.
Sometimes I just use Lemmy with Firefox and that’s when I feel a tad lost. It’s still useable if you put the effort, but it’s clearly not as intuitive as Voyager.
So maybe the Lemmy browser UI should be improved. Also it would be good to have an official Lemmy app for mobile phones as people can get lost with choices.
The problem with the Fediverse is always the onboarding and understanding the basics. Peertube or Lemmy are great but really intimidating for non geeky people.
Also the lack of some content can be problematic. On Lemmy I can find almost everything I want even if some comminities are almost dead, but on Peertube I can only satisfy 1 out of my 4 point of interest (Basketball, Cars and game reviews being the missing one and Linux being the fullfiled one).
Btw PieFed has more or less solved the onboarding problem. Seriously, pick one and make an account even if solely to go through the onboarding wizard and you will be amazed.
Those categories of communities, which are user-customizable and shareable Topic Feeds, are also hella useful, even if only to help you discover communities that you want to subscribe to in your existing account.
Realistically, PieFed is running circles around Lemmy in terms of features. And now PyLova is moving even faster than it (but they mostly tend to share).
A lot of these Reddit comments are from people that seemed to put zero effort into understanding anything. Or perhaps they simply aren’t expressing their thoughts well: like those organized Topic Feeds are not difficult to use at all, making one wonder if they didn’t bother poking around to click on menus enough to know that they are there, or realize that by subscribing to communities that they like, their main Subscribed Feed would be affected. Such people not coming here may be no great loss?
Well you convinced me to give it a try! I hope I’ll be able to interoperate with Lemmy and also export some of my settings.
PieFed interoperates pretty much seamlessly with Lemmy - some post types Lemmy does not support (like user polls) so occasionally you’ll see something in PieFed but not Lemmy, though never the other way around.
Settings Export & Import should work perfectly as well, definitely from Lemmy to PieFed though I never tried that in reverse.
You should really enjoy it!! Anyway, you always have your Lemmy to fall back onto… like during maintenance or whatever.
Even if they aren’t. The interface isn’t that bad. More just different. It takes some adjustment. Although there 100% is an old threaded like interface for lemmy at least. But that’s an issue for Discovery and presentation.
The PieFed UI is strange but more or workable, aside from some things like trying to view a downvote count being incredibly difficult and sometimes impossible. Try writing a long comment in a Lemmy browser interface - it jumps and skips wildly every time you make another key press, it’s horrible. Though it looks beautiful when you use it read-only.
Voyager offers a much nicer UX. Though then 90% of PieFed extra features aren’t workable, with 100% of them being inaccessible from within the app.
This place is hella confusing to non-technical normies.
Honestly I comment mostly from voyager and post mostly from piefed. I hadn’t really noticed that. But I guess that can be chalked up to posting much less. I will have to pay attention more next time I do.
PieFed is in general superior to Lemmy imho, though your choice of admin team is far more important than platform software, I believe.
That said, PieFed.World in particular always struck me as an unfinished test project - probably bc the Topic Feeds at https://piefed.world/topics are so bare-bones. That is one of the most-requested features that PieFed offers but PW seems to basically ignore them?
Anyway from Voyager you’ll never see them in any case:-).
I think there may only be tens of us using the piefed.world interface. It very much is an afterthought. Even the official Mastodon account linked to it hasn’t posted in a couple years lol. I have a piefed.social account as well. Though honestly I’m considering trying to spin up my own small personal instance.
PW has nearly 900 users total of which 200 are active as of this past month - it’s small but solid.
There’s a ton of communities, which have like no or next to no posts - e.g. https://piefed.world/c/wednesday, https://piefed.world/c/snl.
A lot of the content there seems populated exclusively by bots - e.g. https://piefed.world/c/tech, https://piefed.world/c/shit, https://piefed.world/c/scientificarticles, etc.
TenForward is an excellent example: compare the PW version at https://piefed.world/c/tenforward to the LW version and there simply is no comparison at all.
It just overall looks like a test that was never finished. Perhaps Rimu scared the LW admin team away. If so, maybe the PyLova development could be an option?
PieFed/PyLova definitely looks ready to be used to make a new instance - if you take the plunge, then I wish you good fortune in that endeavor! :-)
The post bots are a new thing of the last few months. Look at the mod on almost all those communities. Came in and set up shop a while back. To take advantage of the low activity.
I don’t have anything against post bots explicitly or modding multiple communities. I have two. However there should be limits
Bro Reddit has horrible UI/UX
I agree, but what do I know? I’ve only got a master’s in UX.
Agreed it sucks, but people are used to it? Or the pain points don’t hurt casual users? I’m not sure, but either way that doesn’t mean Lemmy/PieFed can’t be improved
I genuinely don’t care what their feedback is. lol
it’s kinda funny how they’re freaking out over Lemmy and Piefed’s “incredibly unintuitive and unpleasant” UX compared to… Reddit?
If they really love the ads, bots, and default feed of Reddit then I’m happy they’re staying there. I just hope for their sake they don’t get site-banned by an overzealous AI moderator.
Adblock exists, and niche subs (too small to be worth being targeted by bots) actually exist too, unlike here - like a sub dedicated to someone’s local area. Oh, also bots are here on the Threadiverse too.
I’m not advocating for Reddit, just trying to help you understand that you are not seeing their actual experience. Many people avoid r/all (actually r/popular) like the plague, and use old-reddit with RES (I’ve never touched that one personally but supposedly it’s nice or sth?), which they are comfortable and familiar with.
Yes, they might be banned and if so then perhaps they’ll come here, or possibly just as likely leave social media behind altogether. Reading books, touching grass, there are better ways to spend one’s time, and for news perhaps an RSS reader could be preferable anyway.
that’s not UX
It sure is and it impacts your experience as a user, which is literally what UX stands for.
interesting, I always thought the placement of UI/UX meant UX had to be closely related. i mean it still is closely related to UI but it’s less closely-related than I thought
Most of the UI complaints can be solved by using a different front-end. I guess that should be emphasized more when trying to convince people to try it. If any of those people never used old.reddit, I doubt they’ll like reddit either if that was the interface.
I didn’t like the Reddit UI either (old and new), that’s why I used 3rd party apps to access it. When they closed down the API, I left. Reddit always had UI problems.
I dont remember the different frontends since I just voyager on iphone these days, think phtn and tesseract were good, maybe one had a controversy
I think it’s the default as “active” that screws people up. They think it’s stale because they’ve probably not seen any new content for hours.
My favourite “feature” is sorting by Top 6 hours and Top 12 hours and actually seeing an end of content
I do that as a 20 min recap at the end of the day.
maybe also because a lot of instances default to “Local” instead of “All”
On UI: dunno if it’s a me thing, but it would seem to me as that every site’s bad until you get used to it. Piefed for example I find kinda bloated but once I learned where to look, it became much easier to use.
On avoiding content: yeah, requires some patience people usually don’t have to block everyone and every place that lowers the quality of the user’s feed.
On slower feeds: maybe an autism thing, or maybe because in Mbin, I consume both threads and microblogs, but I feel the opposite, too much to see, enough that I am forced to curate.
On seeing posts again: a bit of a tangent, but both Lemmy and Piefed have post-hiding features. The option is “hidden” in the 3 dots menu of each post, which would imply people are forgetting these 3 dots mean “more options”? Perhaps in this line, having a “more” button like on Mbin would be better?
On porn: FediNSFW. 🕵♂
On being complicated: migrating and integrating usually is, but if you do, you need to bear with it.
Would make those comments there if I still had access to my account. Oh well.
Also tried checking the post but every Redlib instance I tried is broken, like Reddit itself broke something. RIP.
On slower feeds: maybe an autism thing, or maybe because in Mbin, I consume both threads and microblogs, but I feel the opposite, too much to see, enough that I am forced to curate.
same, I am subscribed to enough communities that it is hard to find something I saw yesterday, if I didn’t save the link and I don’t remember the title.
The option is “hidden” in the 3 dots menu of each post, which would imply people are forgetting these 3 dots mean “more options”?
I think they just expect to not see yesterday’s already seen content in the feed. hiding is not automatic, for every post thats two taps, and afaik that will hide the post from search results too so not what they are looking for, it would just make more confusion
on the ease of access, no, reddit is not easy to access. my client is not working anymore, and I will never again install that tracking filled garbage app. and the mobile view of the website was restricted I think. only way I can access it is either on my computer, or through redlib websites that periodically go down because of reddit’s fuckery.
I’ve tried both [Lemmy and PieFed], and the UX is […]
That’s excluding the horrible lack of contrast most frontends use, which makes […]
IMO both of the UIs are going to feel weird and limited to someone coming from Reddit / Instagram etc. I find that custom front ends like Photon are a lot better for newcomers.
I know Lemmy is working on a completely new frontend.
Fediverse feels slower, but not in a good way. More of a ‘if I don’t use this for a week, I’ll see new things’. If I log in after 2 or 3 days, I’ll scroll for 10 minutes and see the stuff I saw last time.
I have a constant flow of new content, and see something new every time I open it (which is often, after years of having that muscle memory from reddit).
I’m subscribed to a lot of communities + using scaled sort
I also want nsfw stuff now and then. I hate how censored the internet has become, at least with reddit if I want to see a bit of porn, I can.
This one was weird to me. I remember seeing complaints that reddit has been banning and shutting down its NSFW side, while it’s accessible here.
I tried twice to join those forums within the Fediverse and I can’t get past the captcha test. The fact that you need approval to validate your access doesn’t seem designed to encourage you to recommend it.
I want Lemmy to support HCaptcha
Past that, most people are ok with applications once you explain why they’re necessary.
Also a lot of social media platforms started out as invite only as marketing strategy lol
Most issues aren’t “real” issues, Lemmy and PieFed have great feature-sets. They’re issues with UX/presentation and onboarding.
If I log in after 2 or 3 days, I’ll scroll for 10 minutes and see the stuff I saw last time.
This is the whole reason I use Lemmy! I hate the endless algorithmic slop feeds designed to ensnare users for as long as possible. Let me reach the end! Let me see how posts I’ve already seen have developed! Let me be done with a website for any amount of time!!!
People will complain no matter what.
The Fediverse does require a little effort, as there is no algorithm spoonfeeding you content. Personally, I like that the barrier of entry requires some human effort as it feels like a natural filter for the sorts of elements we don’t want integrating here from platforms like Reddit.
They called it the idiot filter back in the old reddit days
Even with all the blocks I’ve made it just seems to be a bunch of toxic left wing people calling each other fascist because of some minor difference in opinion.
Lol. This part rings so true!
honestly compared to mastodon I can check Lemmy all day and see new things that are actually interesting.
I’m not a big fan of Mastodon, but I never liked microblogging in the first place
