this post was submitted on 03 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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It's kind of awesome :) A question to others here. I mostly see stuff from beehaw and lemmy.ml on All. Are these the most active servers?
It's not terribly active, but my instance midwest.social has people on it. There are dozens of us! Dozens!
I just submitted an application to join, so soon there will be baker’s dozens!
Found it. Still not able to figure out how to follow communities there from Jebora. The technology community seems like my speed on your server :)
Yes, by quite a margin as well, I believe. It's unfortunate, and the only solution is to make diverse instances and advertise them well :) The fediverse is better if the load is more evenly distributed across instances instead of having most users sit on a couple of instances.
For what it's worth, having a few "bigger" instances means less confusion for users who don't completely understand federation yet but still want to make the switch. I wouldn't call it a bad thing, they can always turn to another smaller instance later on.
Sure, that is a valid concern, but maybe that could also be mitigated by making it pretty clear that you can interact with content on other servers just fine, even if you're not from there. Perhaps a little note banner on the "Join Lemmy" page itself.
Regarding moving to another instance, that is not quite possible right now. There's no way to properly move an account to another server, you'd just have to start from scratch with a new identity. In the future, it would be nice to have proper account migration, or at the very least a way to import/export account data.
You're right, a few additions / changes to the Join Lemmy page would indeed go a long way.
Regarding account migration, I'm fairly certain it'll be implemented in the future if the project lives on long enough.
It will happen over time. Lemmy and Beehaw are still infinitesimally small compared to reddit. Trying to push people onto other servers right now is extreme premature optimization.
The issue is that the "first move" advantage is quite real and the momentum gained by lemmy.ml and beehaw.org can easily dwarf diversity on the network. Of course you don't have to aggressively spread people out, but maybe the spotlight should be fairer, so to speak.
Can you explain what the issue is? I think it's all but inevitable that one server will become the "default" server that most people will create an account on first. As they learn more about how everything works, they may choose to create another account on a server with different rules that suite them better. That flow seems much easier to me than putting pressure on new users to pick the "right" server from them off the bat.
It happened with mastodon.social, and it'll probably happen here too.
I have a small, new instance, and I'm not really sure how to advertise it to the lemmy-verse. Do we have a good place to put our instances and what communities we're hosting?
Hey, welcome! Thank you for your contribution to the network :D
As for discoverability, it is a problem yet to be properly solved. For now, I'd suggest making a launch post and share your communities in the many posts that have recently popped around (e.g https://lemmy.pt/post/36126)
Yeah that's what I've been doing so far, for new users it's pretty clear why they're mostly just hanging out in lemmy.ml. Getting the word out about outside communities is a bit difficult, but hopeful. I'm viewing all of this as a perfect "Reddit gave Lemmy a window to view painpoints and minimize them before a larger exodus". I don't think we'll see anything like the migration from Digg, but I see a lot of people who will be open to alternatives if Reddit goes through with this end of month. Right now it's "How do we funnel them" when they drop the hammer.
The time you see a system's weakness most clearly is definitely when stressing it in a real scenario. The goal is to improve further each time we get an influx of users :)
True. Maybe there can be something like rotating registrations.
Except for lemmygrad, yes.
That seemed like a very strange place :|
Strange is a rather euphemistic word for it.
Well I knew many people who were in a similar place in real life. Most of them were unhappy and struggling in real life and got sucked into an ideology that seemed attractive. Eventually after understanding how it doesn't actually solve the problems they struggle with, most of them end up with non-extreme political learnings.
Many of the people I knew struggled a lot during this period and were exploited by others wanting to take advantage of their lack of exposure and experience.
Tldr; I try to be sympathetic to the people there as I've seen many people suffer a lot in real life going through the same. YMMV.
They are not cultists. There are more people from outside the anglosphere there so you might find them strange but try talking to them, they are normal people.
It feels like you've basically not read anything I've written. You'd be glad to know that I'm not in anglosphere and I don't think people who believe in communism are cultists either.
I've lived in one of the few places in the world where a communist leaning government has been elected on and off for many years and they haven't gone down the authoritarian route but participated in democracy.
None of that make the points I made invalid though.
I'm new around here. Why was it strange?
Basically extreme left. Not in the US politics sense but in the I want armed revolution and China is great sense.
@Parsnip8904
I think so. There was also jeremmy.ml but it doesn't seem to be reachable right now.
Thank you :) I remember seeing a solarpunk and another science server in the list but haven't seen anything from those in my all feed either.
@Parsnip8904
It can be because no one on your instance is following communities from over there. There needs to be at least one follower of a topic/community before posts are pulled to the instance you're on.
@Parsnip8904
So if you want to follow a community on another instance which your own instance doesn't know about, take the URL of the community from the remote instance and put it in the search field on your own instance and then you can follow it. After that new posts from there will show up
Thanks a lot! I'm going to try this out now. I wish there was a sidebar or something that explained some gotchas like this.
@Parsnip8904
Yeah that would indeed be helpful.