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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You seem to be conflating "the vast majority" and "people my age". They are not the same.
You're also making a lot of global UX preference claims in this thread without sources or data to back them up.
Look I don't have any data to back it up, only my experience and many others (eg. https://lemmy.ca/comment/14524858)
I'm also not going to go try and dig up all the evidence to try and prove this to you. I am a IT professional and have been part of developing many web apps that see tens of thousands of users per day. We would do AB testing to see what works for users and what gets a better click through rate etc.
As soon as a user needs to think, they drop off like crazy, that's just a fact you can look up good UX design. It's also a fact that joining lemmy requires a lot of thinking and tweaking etc. to get to a good place.
I've been using lemmy for months now, and I'm still not happy with the UI even after tweaking and trying many different things.
A/B testing is not really possible in a decentralized system like this, it would require all instance admins to collaborate for collecting results, and would make deployment much more complicated. Not to forget that there simply arent enough development resources to implement it. That said if you see anything that can be improved, you're welcome to make a pull request. Its standard Typescript wit TailwindCSS and Inferno, nothing complicated.
You don't have to AB test all instances, we can do smaller tests.
But yea that's complicated and takes effort, instead we should at least follow good UX design principles for the default UX
Like I said you're welcome to make pull requests. Lemmy is not a corporation employing multiple designers, but an open source project run by volunteers. So if you want to see something done, it's best to do it yourself.