As a strong supporter of open-source and community-funded projects like Lemmy, which prioritize serving users over investors, I believe Lemmy has significant potential, and that’s why I am here. However, it is clear that its growth is nearing a plateau in its current form. Despite the surge in users following Reddit’s API changes, Lemmy continues to primarily attract tech-savvy individuals, politically left-aligned users, and those accustomed to old Reddit. For Lemmy to reach the broader average general audience, meaningful changes are necessary.
The rise of Bluesky demonstrates the importance of ease of use and a user-friendly design. Its polished and familiar interface is a key reason for its growth and appeal as an alternative to platforms like X/Twitter. This same ease of use is what Mastodon lacked, leading to its initial hype fading quickly. The average user is unlikely to adapt to something that feels complicated or unfamiliar, and this challenge also applies to Lemmy.
As someone who started as an average Reddit user and became more tech-savvy over time, I can confidently say that first impressions matter. When users first visit lemmy.world, the default UI is often enough to discourage them from staying. Most will not explore the homepage sidebar to explore, figure out and switch to one of the alternative UIs available, which is unfortunate because a better UI could make a huge difference.
This is why I propose that large servers like lemmy.world adopt Photon UI as the default web interface. Photon is currently the best and most mature alternative UI, offering a visually appealing, modular design that feels familiar to users of new Reddit. It makes excellent use of screen space and provides customization options like compact and cozy views. Unlike some other alternative UIs, Photon is actively maintained and ready for widespread use, although in no way is it perfect, this can also help bring in more contributors to the project development.
While it is important to continue offering other UIs as options, I believe adopting Photon as the default UI could make Lemmy far more appealing to the average Reddit user. First impressions are crucial, and the current default UI has turned off many potential users. If we want Lemmy to succeed as a true Reddit alternative, we need to prioritize user experience and accessibility. Thankfully today, Lemmy still continues to be THE biggest Reddit alternative, while our userbase is still considerably smaller than Reddit, it’s the biggest of any alternatives, and Lemmy continues to somewhat be in the spotlight for those seeking alternatives, we can’t let growth stagnate, it’s high time we make the platform more welcoming and appealing for the average joe.
Good! Lemmy doesn’t need to become big, especially since the less techy masses will likely put loads of load on privately hosted instances without bothering to donate.
The growth could actually kill Lemmy.
Please no!
We’re at 44k monthly active users https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
100k or 200k wouldn’t kill the platform
Eh, i agree that lemmy shouldn’t grow too big (Reddit is an example of why, feels like a circlejerk of bots and reposts), but the userbase feels too small currently. On a lot of communities, The activity is 1-2 posts a week, which makes it feel quite dead. And I especially miss the niche communities that you could join on reddit, for small games or obscure topics.
I mean, yes. And I also like the oldschool interface, it does have its iffy corners but the overall layout and UX is great.
That said, there’s a difference between “avoid (success at all costs)” and “(avoid success) at all cost”. We should be making lemmy better for the purpose of making lemmy better, we shouldn’t be changing it just to please random people so they come over.
I disagree. We want all people and all perspectives. Federarion needs to become the default to put enough pressure on the big tech companies to get all people on a common protocal. It is the ideal that web3.0 promised to be.
Also we need to monitise lemmy so that running an instance is profitable enough to support the usrload. I think we can do this via lemmy gold make it monero based where a golded post/comment get split between instance/community/post/comment. Align profit incentives with making federated media better for everyone.