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?

  • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    9·
    9 days ago

    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.

    • AnonomousWolf@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      31·
      9 days ago

      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

        • AnonomousWolf@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          1·
          9 days ago

          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 `

          • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            3·
            9 days ago

            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.