The userbase here is quite technical so there are many of you able to contribute.

As a project manager, I can help by ballooning the scope and setting the deadline to yesterday! Doing my part!

Hey if an old guy like me can figure it out its not hard .

I don't have much to say, but thank you for working on lemmy all these years.

I can complain about it a lot sometimes, but I'm very grateful for both the communities and the developers that kickstarted the fediverse, and for free too! So, thank you ❤️

If you or other people want to discuss the development of fedisoftware for beginners, or just growing as a whole you and everyone else are more than welcome at !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com!

I have nothing to add except I hope you're still enjoying Lord of the Rings.

Also remember to be nice. I see heated arguments regressing into ad hominems by the third comment pretty regularly. We can be better than Reddit

I'm doing my small part.

Went from 100% lurker on Reddit to regularly active lemmy commenter

Good post

Also, !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com for people who want to help promoting Lemmy Mbin Piefed

My proposal have been a little more complicated, but IMO works well for a BFU:

• create some set of rules for "default instances" - every instance that wants to be in the list must follow them and will be periodically checked
  • I don't have any particular rules in mind, but some examples might include active moderation team, obviously registrations being open and if you really want to make it easy, either no application question or having it automatically approved by an automod of some kind
• on join-lemmy, present a registration form that will create an account on a randomly selected instance from the pool and redirect there afterwards
• there should be a link somewhere for "experts" where you could link to the current wizard

I'm willing to work on this if we can sit down and agree on the criteria for the pool. I can also ask my UX guy to help a little.

Feel free to text me here or on Matrix if this is something you think is worth pursuing. I'd also appreciate if you let me know it's not the direction you want to go in.

I'm the OP of one of the posts that blew up about UX.

This is great news, I will look into building something like join-lemmy/onboarding that could guide users, or improving join-lemmy

"Which server do I join?" seems to be a sticking point for a lot of people.

The "Browse servers" page does say at the top "You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn't matter which one you choose", but on showing this page you immediately scroll that message off the screen. Maybe if you kept that bit visible it would help.

Also I think comparing it with email servers might be helpful. People already know they can email anyone from any email server, and that signing up to, say, Posteo, doesn't mean you can only email other Posteo users.

All this said, there have also been some suggestions to make onboarding easier by directing new users to a hardcoded default instance. This may sound like a good idea at first but won't work well in practice. Running such an instance would take significant time for administration and moderation, but we maintainers are already too busy. Besides it would be impossible to reach an agreement who this default instance should federate with or how exactly it should be moderated. So if you want to get nontechnical users to Lemmy, the solution is to link them directly to a specific instance based on their interests.

Wholeheartedly agree with this. Also people should get use to taking responsibility for their online experiences. Corporations have made people stupid to the point they reject autonomy.

Let's all be clear, Reddit is part of the surveillance state.

You can't log in without Google and Apple trackers being allowed. New Reddit has recapcha trackers on every page. Only old.reddit doesn't track what you see, just what you write.

Your thoughts and content belong to a publicly traded company focused on profits if you use reddit.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the effort to make joining Lemmy easier has some downsides. One of the nicest things about these communities is how easy it is to have good conversations with internet strangers. I’ve grown to appreciate and hope for Lemmy not trying to be a Reddit replacement. In fact, I’m totally fine with “the masses” staying in Spez’s data harvesting machine. If, one day, Lemmy gets as popular as Reddit, I think it will inevitably have many of the same problems. It just theoretically won’t be selling your data for profit (one hopes, anyway). My wife isn’t super-techy, and I explained the concept of Lemmy to my wife in about 10 minutes. She set up an account in about 5.

To me, it’s not that using or joining Lemmy is hard. It’s that a lot of people have come to loathe change. They’re told that Lemmy is “like Reddit,” so why leave Reddit, all their accumulated Internet points, and their familiar communities/echo chambers? Pretty much all of them also use other data-harvesting social media sites, so they mostly don’t care about that aspect. When I tell my friends about Lemmy I talk about how the size of the communities is really conducive to good conversations from wide enough ranges of opinions and experiences, compared to Reddit’s too much of everything including trolls.

I don't really agree that it's much easier to start on Reddit. Especially nowadays.

-Post from an IP that was once used by a banned account? Also banned (after first being shadowbanned)

-Try to post in any niche sub of your choosing after making an account? Forget it, wait three weeks and farm 3K karma first (which encourages shitposting and reposting, lowering quality)

-Deviate a fraction of an inch from whatever sub's 500-page rulebook? Banned.

-Try to argue an unbanning? That's a permanent mute.

-Post anything - and I do mean anything - in a "wrong" sub, get immediately permabanned by a slew of subs you didn't even know existed.

-Some mod doesn't agree with something you posted? Even if it was 5 years ago in a sub that has since been deleted? Banned and muted.

Reddit is an absolutely terrible experience for new posters. How they even manage to retain a tenth of them is beyond me. I encourage them to keep it up however, more traffic for Lemmy.

I can confirm. These guys are very open to pull requests that improve the platform.

Easier

If choosing a server and signing up is too "hard" for someone, then I'd rather they stay on Reddit.

Can Lemmy benefit from your suggestions, definitely. But the easy vs hard structure to these types of conversations feel a lot like the shopping cart dilemma.

FWIW, I think the design and layout of lemmy is superb. Way better than reddit, old and new.

You guys made a lot of good decisions.

I dont know. Not sure what can be improved, because that site keeps sending the majority of users to the large instances. Its against everything the fediverse was supposed to be. Decentralized. Not 5 instances having all users.

But whatever. Im happy on my smaller instance. :)

If you see anything...that could be improved, the best option is to make that improvement yourself.

Are you under the impression that just everyone is a web developer?

Besides it would be impossible to reach an agreement who this default instance should federate with or how exactly it should be moderated.

If I may make a proposition: You can look at how Pixelfed allows certain instances that meet certain standards to opt into being listed in the app for discovery, all electronically. My recommendation would be to have 2 choices for users on sign-up:

1. A random choice from the list of approved instances, that's rotated periodically to prevent any particular instance from being inundated with new signups
2. "Choose a different instance" where users can enter their preferred one manually.

People can't seem to make up their minds if it matters which instance you join. I really don't think it does.

Thank you for this post and encouragement. I am open to volunteering my time and talents to help people find Lemmy.

However, after the work is done, it would be fantastic if you all could invest in advertising. I know that Google and Bing aren't great but if I had to guess, search trend for "reddit alternatives" is probably rising and Lemmy is in a great spot to provide reddit refuges a life raft.

The great thing about Lemmy is that it is an open source project and you can tweak the UI yourself if you have a bit of HTML and CSS knowledge. Do not be put off by fancy words like Bootstrap, Inferno, Tailwind, many are just HTML, CSS, or Javascript under the hood.

If anyone on here is looking for a more a more accessible Lemmy theme, I helped make one recently for the instance RBlind: RBlind Lemmy Themes (Codeberg repo). I made detailed documentation as well which could be helpful for theme developers or for those interested in helping improve Lemmy's accessibility.

Since making the theme, I've been making some pull requests (PRs) with lemmy-ui and lemmy-docs to try improve the UI and docs based on some of the things I saw while developing the theme. I hadn't done anything involving PRs before but the Lemmy team dessalines and nutomic and other contributors have been very receptive so far and offering helpful suggestions. The changes are small but every bit counts, and when they trickle down to all users I am hoping it'll be a positive change for many users.

In terms of the "default instance" suggestion, I have an interesting hybrid suggestion. What about having an "easy on-ramp" instance where you get registered for one month with a hard-exit (auto-migrate to other instance, perhaps using some kind of federated-auth/token system for the migration, and forced password-setup on first use of the new instance). At any point during on-ramp the user could configure destination-instance from a list in the settings (or configure auto-export for manual import to any other "auto-migrate-unsupported" instance), with optional early-migration if the user has decided before the end of the month. Optionally a recommendation engine could iteratively curate a list of suggested instances based on usage during on-ramp (admins of those instances could provide - limited number of - tags of their choosing for the engine to use for matching). That part could be opt-in because probably a lot of users would find it creepy. The UX would need to be very user-friendly "pointy clicky" because that would be the overwhelming target demographic of such an instance. I think "on-boarding and educating" is better than "gatekeeping" (which feels like the "if you need to ask the price you can't afford it" shopping trope). A nice side-effect is it already painlessly introduces users to the killer-feature "easy migration" between instances due to data-portability.