this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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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.