this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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I hate to say this but Lemmy is way less user friendly than Reddit. I doubt anything close to 10% of reddit will come over here. This site should focus on improving new user acquisition.
Not a good name for a social media site. Google/Youtube searching "Lemmy" just gives results for a guitarist
The average joe doesn't understand how federation works
You have to decide which place to make an account
You have to write an essay to join (I've seen people complain about this)
The top instances look very political/left wing
If you're persistent, educate yourself, and make it through the process, you can join a site with ~1000 active users.
Following remote communities is unintuitive. You have to search the link from your instance to subscribe to another instance (e.g., if your account is on beehaw, you have to search !gaming@lemmy.ml. You can't click their subscribe button on lemmy.ml.)
You and I know that different instances of Lemmy are mutually accessible and so #3 and #5 are not a problem. But for the uneducated all the above are significant barriers for entry/retention.
"just gives results... for a.. guitarist."
lol! Lemmy was mind-blowing amazing and I'm not at all surprised he's all over the top results. I get your point though and def not trying to disparage you :)
I'm more into black/death metal so I'm not too versed on Motorhead. But I hear Lemmy was the GOAT
#1 Same with a lot of new social media, discord actually meant something different before 2015
#2 They don't need to at a technical level
#3 If you find it challenging to decide which server to join then I really don't know what to tell you. Its a small barrier to entry and objectively a good thing. An small IQ test of sorts.
#4 I'd imagine this is for spam / bot protection, and it may change in the future. I kinda like it, it keeps a lot of toxic users / trolls out. Sure the community is smaller but its more inviting for those that took the time.
#5 How is that different from reddit? View r/all at anytime and it was composed of left wing articles and users.
#6 Not 100% sure what your arguing here
#7 I actually find the idea of similar communities on different instances confusing (eg. !memes@lemmy.ml & !memes@beehaw)
edit: spelling
edit 2: it may be a little confusing to users that all servers can talk to eachother through federation so thats probably what confuses people. This could be explained better on the join-lemmy webpage. either way this will probably be similar to mastadon in terms of how it'll go down, lots of users join, instances have a hard time keeping up at first, then they stabilize.
Personally I think the requirement to explain why you want to join a lemmy instance is 100% brilliant. If you can answer coherently you're clearly not a robot, and probably don't intend to spam.
The text field itself doesn't require any minimum or maximum character counts so there's no pressure to be wordy. In fact I think those who read that information appreciates when you can achieve some brevity but still communicate clearly in your own words why you're signing up.
Additionally different instances have different priorities and needs; so I suspect they can ask for even more information or writing samples if needed; or ask for as little as possible to discourage users from being too crazy.
You're right, and the manual signups should help slow the flood of users.
100% agree, I kinda hope they keep it in a way because its probably better than most standard captchas.
Like I said, #3 and #5 aren't a problem if you know about federation. But without understanding the concept of federation you might have some misunderstandings about Lemmy. For example, you might think that when you sign up for an instance you can only see communities on that instance. So the choice of instance becomes very important. Alternatively, you might think that all instances are automatically connected. So you might not know that instance admins can block other instances (like how beehaw blocks lemmygrad). Then, because you want nothing to do with lemmygrad, you might decide not to be a part of Lemmy.
By point #6, I just meant to say that Lemmy is a much smaller community than redditors are used to.
Also, as an addendum, not all of these are problems for me. Clearly, I'm using Lemmy so I made it past these hurdles lol. But, yeah, some people are going to see that you have to write an essay and just nope outta here. Some of those people aren't toxic, they're just lazy. And, in many ways, Lemmy forces you to go that extra mile which is going to hurt its user growth.
Yes and thats true aswell, some instances aren't connected to one another so that might be an issue for someone just picking a random instance. The solution is quite simple though, make it clear in the join-lemmy page the federation status, or have a link to all the banned instances the admins have put in place. Overall I'm still very hopeful and worried about the coming days, this community has already grown but its not over yet.