• 2 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • In all honesty, as much as I want non-profit Reddit alternatives to succeed, I think Lemmy is a tough sell to Redditors. Here’s roughly how I think that’d go.


    Lemmy user: “You should try Lemmy”

    Redditor: “Sure, what’s its website?”

    Lemmy user: “There are many”

    Redditor: “Wait what”

    Lemmy user: “You have to pick one”

    Redditor: “Why?”

    Lemmy user: “See, Lemmy is not a website, but a network of federated instan-”

    Redditor: “That sounds complicated. I just want a website like Reddit”

    Lemmy user: “But don’t you care about how Reddit has treated its mods, app devs and the general community?”

    Redditor: “Yeah but all this Lemmy and Kbin stuff is confusing. Can I just use a website without reading up on all this Fediverse stuff?”

    Lemmy user: “Okay, just go to Lemmy.world”

    Redditor: “It seems to be down”

    Lemmy user: “Hmm, maybe try Lemmy.ml?”

    Redditor: “This website looks a little… hard to wrap my head around”

    Lemmy user: “There are alternative frontends”

    Redditor: “What now?”

    Lemmy user: “Do you know about Alexandrite?”

    Redditor: “Nevermind, I’m out”


    If we want to convince a wide range of users to use Lemmy, we have to make using Lemmy a no-brainer for everyone.

    I’m trying to contribute by building a new opensource web UI that I hope will provide a better UX for the average Redditor. It’s not ready to become a daily driver yet, but I’m hoping to get to a point where it’s nice enough that instances will want to host it on their domain. Maybe I’m delusional in thinking this web UI will appeal to users that don’t like the current ones. But there’s only one way to find out, and that is to build it.



  • Fair enough. I’m currently focused on creating my own Lemmy web UI, but later I might have room to submit some SEO-related PRs. While I’m not yet sure what needs to be done, instance owners can get tailored recommendations from Google. I have a hunch that Lemmy is currently being penalized for duplicate content, which we might be able to mitigate by adding `` to federated posts.

    I’m fully with you on not wanting to cater to Google. On the other hand, if someone writes a helpful Lemmy post, I would like people who don’t know Lemmy to be able to find it.