I second this. I know SEO is a controversial term with Lemmy's core audience, but being able to find posts through a search engine is pretty darn helpful. It'll also help more people find their way to Lemmy, which will diversify the range of communities.

If you're not sure where to start, Google's free Search Console can give you insight into how your site ranks, how people are finding you and which factors are preventing instances from appearing in search.

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.

As a user, I completely agree. People often make decisions in a few seconds, and you've done all this work developing an app. That little extra step will allow you to make a difference to more people!

As a developer of a Lemmy web UI, I've been thinking about adding screenshots to my README for weeks but still haven't done so 🙈

GitHub and GitLab both support inserting images into your README.md. Here's the syntax:

![Description of the image](https://path/to/image)

Done!

If it was that easy to convince Redditors, we'd already have a very diverse userbase. But by all means, keep spreading the word. We all want Lemmy to succeed.

Joking aside, I'm already donating the labor involved to create an alternative web UI. That's as far as I'm willing to go for this project.

Heck yeah, share your work with the world.

We should probably compile a regularly updated list somewhere. It's great that people have so many options. Now we just need to make it easier for them to find a web UI that suits their needs.

It's a just rhetorical device to explain a theory for why most Redditors haven't jumped ship yet. It may be correct, it may be incorrect.

lala

Interesting! If there are two deleted comments underneath 2157873, that could indeed explain the two "missing" comments.

Ah, bingo: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3722

Ah, good point.

Thanks - I'll remove this post and create one there.

It really doesn’t matter much to the user how many comments are going to be loaded next in my opinion, and that keeps it simple on our end.

Here's what trips me up: even if I don't display the number, I still need to know whether extra comments can be loaded on that depth. If not I don't want to display a "Load more". You could of course let the "Load more" load hidden comments at any level of that subtree, but I think that causes unexpected behavior.

Maybe this clarifies what I'm talking about:

In the case on the right, there's an unexpected downward shift of content which may disorient the user.