tbf people just wanna sign up and click on funny links, not browse through 100 rando instances to find the one that lines up with their exact interests and wait for approval and worry about uptime and whether their instance will still exist in a year
Very true. It would be sad to build up a persona on a smaller instance to then have it go dark and take your user with it. Other than losing your collection of "upvotes," you can just recreate a new user with the same display name on another instance and keep going. 👍
Holy crap, you can do Slack style emoticons? Huzzah! 🎉
I feel that, while lemmy is still a work in progress, it is already pretty adequate for solving this need. If you want to subscribe to other instances you can do it from within your insance by going up to communities and searching. You can also click the all tab and see a bunch of instances from around lemmy that your instance is federated with.
I think mastadon struggled with this because the twitter model is to follow people and depending how far removed the servers are this can be trickier. Compared to lemmy where people interested in a single subject will likely target and find the subject theyre interested in and bring themselves together naturally.
Furthermore I think some people are splitting up and dividing into sub instances and tiny subjects a little prematurely. Reddit didnt get super esoteric with it's subs until it got big and the larger subs either declined or got too noisy to talk about certain things. Like for example how beehaw has an operatingsystems instance instead of a linux, ubuntu, macos, windows, fedora, archinux, opensuse, openbsd, etc. Right now there arent enough of us that we dont need to subdivide.
I've seen people literally signing up here just to make like 50 empty communities and not post or comment on anything at all. Definitely a lot of folks just trying to stake some territory that they think will be valuable in the future.
Let me see if I underatand this correctly:
If I create an account on a random, small instance. And then go to the "all communities" feed. I can automatically see all communities that are in my instance. In addition to that, I can see all communities of other Lemmy instances, that are "federated". But I cannot see other communities from other nstances, unless I go on there, find the communitis and manually subscribe to them (I believe there are other ways to get them to show up, like using the search etc.?)
So, as a normal user. Who's just looking for a replacement for /r/all, wouldn't joining the largest lemmy instance that is fedarated to many others (Just by how many users it has, because it's the users who link instances by their actions?) make perfect sense?
hi from other fediverse server
New feddit.de user reporting in
Ze Germans seem to have their own monopolistic instance
Created mine on feddit.de to get the german equivalent of Catastrophe as a username. And also because I live in Germany
German "Catastrophe" is "Katastrophe". "Katzastrophe" is "Katze"+"Katastrophe", which in english would be "cat" + "catastrophe"... oh.
Problem is that a) new users don’t know that they can join communities across servers, and b) it is intuitive use start with the servers that a lot of people like.
Instance browsing and onboarding is probably the biggest challenge to Lemmy’s growth. The current experience either scares new people away, or encourages them to congregate on a limited set of instances.
I applied to 3 instances when I decided to join and lemmy.ml was the only one that responded so there's that.
It's also that lemmy.ml is the instance I've seen posted everywhere when it's brought up, so naturally people would just sign up there instead of finding somewhere else.
How's it work if I get banned from one instance? Yet I can still comment in that instance I got banned from? No clue how that works
If you get banned from your home instance, you're banned everywhere.
If you get banned on a different instance, you can no longer post/comment/vote in communities there but otherwise you're fine.
If the registration process just picked a random instance for you, maybe something nearby, and assured new users that they can visit communities and interact with users across instances, very few would pick the biggest instance.
That isn't guaranteed, though. The other day I wanted to create a new community and was browsing instances on join-lemmy.org/instances for an instance that was compatible rulewise. The one I picked evidently wasn't a good pick (burggit.moe). Trying to advertise my new community, I found out it was defederated from beehaw (and likely others) and got insulted as a pedophilia sympathizer ...
Randomly assigning new users to instances would make a substantial fraction of people very unhappy.
As someone who intentionally joined a different instance, the biggest issue is the “federation” doesn’t allow cross-authentication. Clicking a link to another instance moves me to that instance where I’m not logged in. Authentication should really be cross-instance.
Lemmy.world checking in
I joined mander.xyz because it has a lot of science oriented communities and that's why I'm here. Super happy to have found it.
I'm in lemmy.world. they have an associated mastodon as well.
The dude on the left is too happy about it to be a lemmy.ml admin.
First I created account there and then landed on my current instance, because lemmy.ml's admin views looks sketchy for me. Been living in ex-ussr for all my life I just cant accept all that communists and marxists and the fact that lemmy.ml has /c/Communism on it.
I know that's silly but that's why I'm not there anymore.
I signed up for another one, but they haven't approved me yet!
proudly hailing from NOT lemmy.ml 🤗
I definitely didnt pick sh.itjust.works for the funny name, naaaaaaaaah
And I thought I had choose the wrong one....
Lemmy.world gang
.world rise up!
.world reporting in
The documentation explaining how fediverse works is so bad. It's so long and convoluted anyone new just can't be bothered reading it.
Docu-what now?
Seriously, if the average user needs to understand distributed systems to play in the fediverse pool, they are going to land back at Reddit. Just get people in the door (any door) and fight the technical debt that creates later.
Sure, it's a shit plan. But, it's the only way to really capitalise on the current moment. With both Twitter and Reddit blasting away at their own feet, there is a real opportunity for something better to step up. The fediverse can be that thing. But, not if people end up gatekeeping it. Less Stallman style, "RTFM!" And more, "hey, welcome. Let's get you set up."
Idk what's going on, I just know I'm ready for open source options. I'm signed up here and mastodon now and plan to use the duration of the reddit strike to learn more about these platforms, delete my activity on others, and slowly build communities so I'm not reliant on others for news and learning.
I don't think it's too difficult to figure out. Seems more like a matter of shifting activity to keep people engaged. I'm far from tech literate, though.
Well, that's my point. We need a cheat sheet easy to read that gives most of the necessary information to create an account and use different instances and how to post from one to another.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/index.html is good but way too much for newcomers
Yeah. It needs to be explained much better. Compare it to email or something
I recognize it's easier said than done obviously and I don't have a good solution to propose; but if there was a way to make the app UI more user friendly it might help the understandability of the fediverse and subsequently lower the barrier to entry. Unless someone can figure out how to make it more seemless of an experience, it's gonna be hard to get massive traction
Other servers are snappier than lemmy.ml
Hello from lemmy.world! Don't come here, I think it's starting to get overloaded too. Lemmy.one looks like it may be in a good "growing but not snowballing yet" position, go over there and get that ball rolling.
I tried to make an account on lemmy.ml and it looks like their servers are (understandably) overloaded
I ended up choosing lemmy.world instead
My understanding is I'm not missing out on anything by chosing a less-popular instance. Did I get that right?
