this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
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Every single time you offer an alternative to people, if it's not a perfect clone they complain that it's too confusing. What they're really saying is they didn't want to have to learn a single new thing at all.
I dont mind those people not joining.
I do. Many times, it can be from a failure in UX or bad choice of on-boarding steps by the referrer, and not from their incapability of learning and building. Those people aren't less valuable just because they didn't overcome a circumstantial hurdle.
Personally, I'm taking steps to lower that hurdle. I refuse to link anyone to the Join Lemmy page. That's a bad on-boarding practice, and we had Mastodon to prove it, because it drove away even plenty of valuable techies. I'm linking everyone directly to Lemmy.ml and Beehaw, which can be explored without committing, and telling them to consider explore the fediverse "later" if they like the way these vanilla instances work. Let's first show that the content and feature set is perfectly capable and there's nothing to dislike.
Its really better to link to joinlemmy so that people get distributed across different instances. We dont want everyone to be on the same instance, that would cause many problems.
Yes, but that's the thing, that's a culture, philosophy and safeguard concern. We want the ecosystem to be distributed because of many reasons we can go copy paste off of a fediverse explanation page or video.
But in these times, when people are looking for social media replacements, they do not share those concerns. Not initially at least. I see it like a hierarchy of needs but for social media consumption. We risk tiring people out at the understanding and culture step when all they're looking for in that moment is for ease of access to content and discussion. We can have our cake and eat it too by showing them that, yes, this platform can fit their needs, and also hint that it has these interoperability, customization, privacy and so on advantages that they can easily find about.
Look, I'm just saying, Mastodon has a bad rep. I met plenty of supposedly smart people who treat the whole Twitter migration thing as "those dumb evangelists with their stupid platform that doesn't even have a functional tag search ahah". People who had no trouble going back to other, older platforms. I'm not letting that happen again, at least not from my hand. I'm going to sell from the bottom of their pyramid.
I think it's good to have a mix of both, personally I have no qualms with you or anyone else linking lemmy.ml, beehaw.org over join-lemmy.org.
Even Reddit started off as one page for everything, then added subreddits with reddit.com/r/reddit.com still as the catch-all, before locking it in 2012. I think having two or three big catch-all sites is fine and anyone interested in specific topics create another account elsewhere.
Question as a new user: what would be the point or purpose in creating an account elsewhere if lemmy.ml has the c/ communities which are basically like subreddits that you can subscribe to? If I'm interested in specific topics, why not discuss those topics under their communities here rather than join a whole different instance for it?
lemmy.ml, beehaw.org would most likely host generic versions of those. But as the network grows there may be more and more specific categories people may be interested in, that don't have to or shouldn't be on one server.
E.g. technology. lemmy.ca could feature Canadian specific tech. Feddit.de would have most articles in German. A FOSS-oriented instance would have most articles to do with open source
The server you sign up with mainly controls what you see by default in your home. If you want to see less politics and more tech related stuff then you would sign up on a tech-focused instance. Or if you don't like the rules or the moderator of your current server, then you can create an account on another server. You need to abide by the rules of the server you post to if you post outside your home server.
This is better in an ideal world, but not practical right now. Let at lease one lemmy instance reach critical mass and become popular, then people will be more interested and learn about federation, and then people will start to branch out to other instances as they learn about what the differences are.
People need a smooth transition. That's the most important right now.
If you wanted to maintain distribution while also lowering onboarding friction, couldn't you round robin 301 redirects to the signup pages on the instances listed on the joinlemmy page or something? I guess with each instance being moderated differently, having different rules, and having a different culture/focus that might not fly, idk.
I think the very tiny barrier of entry to the fediverse helps keep it feeling mature. It's not flooded with teenagers who got their first phone like Reddit is