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this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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When I was recruiting people during r/place and the protests, I found most of the issue being proper user guides to get people to sign up. Lemmy may be pretty confusing, especially to non-techies.
I still don't really get what people find so difficult about picking an instance. Most people seem to manage getting an email account, which requires picking an email provider like Gmail, Outlook, etc. Joining Lemmy isn't that much different.
I'd hazard a guess and suggest the word "instance" confuses most and puts them off.
Could continue with the email analogy and call it “provider”?
I suspect that would help
A Lemmy provider. Haha, guess that works
It is like picking an email provider, but it's like picking an email provider in the early days when there were no big players. People are more comfortable picking a provider that has a big name backing it. You even just mentioned providers from Google and Microsoft. No such options exist for Lemmy so people see all the instances and get overwhelmed. Personally it doesn't bother me because I don't care that much about my account history, but if you're a content creator you don't want to lose your account so it can be a deterrence, and other people may worry more about picking the wrong instance. I think it's also not very straightforward what the implications of picking an instance is and a lot of instances don't do a good job explaining their policies.
I think the issue is mentioning lemmy being federated and having instances in the first place, even as a tech user a senior software developer I had to learn about how it works does stuff sync up etc.
Now imagine a non techie user.
And that doesn't even mention stuff like instances being defederared from each other.
I remember trying Mastodon first, and my first reaction was, "What the fuck? I have to choose a specific sub/server?", and as I read through the list of each server that said things like "This is a community for camping enthusiasts", I found myself extremely off put, as I don't believe (at the time anyway) that anything said the server didn't matter and I would still have full access to the other boards. It sounded as though I would have to pick explicitly between a camping-centric community, a tech-centric community, a car-centric community, etc.
Lemmy was a little easier to grasp, though I did gravitate straight to Lemmy.ca because that sounded like the most practical option given what I wanted to access and where I live. But the setup process was definitely a learning curve. Eventually I wound up really liking it, but it didn't truly fall into place until Sync dropped. Now my experience is nearly indistinguishable from my past ten years on reddit, minus the constant angst, hostility, and doom scrolling.
I tried to get my tech-savvy brother on here to no avail. He showed up when a bunch of servers were being defederated and I guess he thought it was setting a bad precedent right off the bat. I'm assuming he was unknowingly on one of the bad servers and was being exposed to their bitching and complaining without realizing what was really going on with them.
We need a service called LemmyIn that does everything for you and places you in every available instance it can find, save for anything inherently bad or controversial.
It's because, like with email, the average person doesn't give a fuck what provider they choose. They want to use "Lemmy", they don't care if it's lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, etc.
It matters even less than with email, if they're using a third-party app like Sync, because it's not like they'll ever look at the instance their name is hosted on.
Because people don't explain it with good analogies like that. That's the first I heard it put that way, and I found it helpful.
One thing I had an issue with when I migrated was actually understanding the differences between instances. A few aren't obvious as to their purpose. If you randomly pick the wrong one to look at first, you may get a negative impression of the fediverse because of it.
What was your negative experience?
I would say my hardest thing onboarding was actually understanding what each instance was really about. Your pretty much presented with endless choices seemingly and you can't really weigh every option.
Yeah that’s what you said in the comment I replied to. Was wondering what that negative experience you had was. Other then them defederating, shutting down, or having overall crappy uptime there’s not a whole lot of differences when using Lemmy.
For newcomers it's not clear what the significance of choosing an instance is, so that makes it hard to choose, and those potential downsides of choosing the wrong instance are actually pretty significant, or at least pretty annoying.
Yes I understand this. I’m just trying to open up the conversation on what those negatives are for people to see.
I see. There aren't other major negatives that come to mind, but those ones are very important.
Oh I see what you were getting at. The second half of my message talking about getting a negative impression was more so speculation on how someone might react to joining one of the more politically charged instances like lemmygrad or hexbear. Which could give a new user the impression that the fediverse was all like that.
I think they made it easier by having a suggested instances category at the top. And even back then, you could see the description of every instance listed. I think the main issue is having to submit the application, even though I know it doesn't have to be long and that it's necessary in this situation.
Getting banned from ML for saying that Russia is commiting war crimes in Ukraine. And then again for saying that the US revolution didn't generally involve mass rape. And then again for calling an obvious troll out.
This last time, the ban reason was literally "Socsa." Which I guess is flattering, but being put on a short leash for not breaking any rules, while tankies are free to troll threads with pig shit gifs is not a positive experience.
The stuff you’re talking about is why a lot of people are turned off period. Which people have already made that point in this thread.
You’ll get banned on ML for much of anything. I’m banned in the memes community of all places. This is not dependent on the instance you decided to use.
There needs to be groups of communities you can block or subscribe to. I couldn't give two shits about Linux or sports teams or gross anime porno. Seeing all that will put off most casual visitors. After 6 months of blocking communities I have a fairly decent front page but still block weird anime shit daily. 99.999% of people will just flounce.
This is where the real problem is. Lemmy users act like there's no issue, because you can block anyone you like, but to most users exploring the platform, that's not helpful at all.
People generally don't want to have to spend an hour making the feed into something useable, much less 6 months. What will draw people in is a feed that is already interesting and useful, which they can customize as they go.
I think the solution would be a set of default subscriptions, and even a default block list. Something that instance admins can curate themselves for the new user experience, but users can still customize as they see fit as they get to know the platform and communities
Absolutely. Even just blocking languages you can't speak would help.
I'm still confused by the need for blocking communities. Maybe it's because I use Sync, but I only subscribe to communities I'm interested in, and I use trending/new community pages to find new ones to subscribe to. My front page is my subscribed communities, so I am never subjected to all the other content I don't care about
I browse everything and block things I don't like. That way I get an endless scroll, like reddit, and don't have 5 posts from my subscribed list. That let's me see everything and I can subscribe to things I might otherwise never see. Just a different approach. There is a metric fuck-ton of dreck though.
This is a symptom of the problem, I think. The idea of a social media platform being confusing enough to even need a new user guide will be enough to put people off.
I think the conversation needs to be framed differently. Most new users aren't going to care about federation or decentralization when they first look at the platform. Don't tell people to choose an instance, just recommend one that you think is good. At that point, the only thing that will draw people in is to see interesting conversations and communities when they visit.
To me, that means feeds that aren't dominated by niche interests by default. Don't get me wrong, I love Star Trek and I appreciate Linux for what it's good at. But if I wasn't into those things, I would think those are the only communities being represented here.
In that respect, the sorting algorithm needs work. The votes are a good way to start, but it's become pretty clear that in the new user feed, some communities need to be weighted differently than others. The initial experience should probably show more actual conversations, and fewer communities that live off bot posts.
People were really excited about being able to make bots that repost entire rss feeds or repost other site content into everyone's Lemmy front page, and those are fun projects to work on. But those need to have a lot smaller impact on the default feed that instances show
Yeah, lets wait til the bugs in 0.19.1 are ironed out too please 😌 (well, the big federation bug at least).
With over a million users, I personally don't feel an overwhelming urge to make more people come here, I prefer a more organic growth, but that's maybe only me.
Good. It should be difficult. Means it keeps out the smartphone influencer types. Make this place too accessible, it'll be ruined. Guaranteed.
Like I do want everyone to be able to use the internet, but I do want a space that requires some minimum level of technical competency. It's a very easy filter to find people more like myself.
I agree. Let the people who want to use their phones to access twitter / instagram whatever. I don't want this place opening up and exploding into popularity, that's when shit is going to go downhill fast.
I feel all you guys, but, if it ever reaches the stage where it's mainstream, we could all move to a more techie instance amongst ourselves.