People need to realize you can use alternatives

  • Ghostalmedia@beehaw.org
    3·
    2 years ago

    Problem is that a) new users don’t know that they can join communities across servers, and b) it is intuitive use start with the servers that a lot of people like.

    Instance browsing and onboarding is probably the biggest challenge to Lemmy’s growth. The current experience either scares new people away, or encourages them to congregate on a limited set of instances.

    • nattekrant@feddit.nl
      1·
      2 years ago

      If the registration process just picked a random instance for you, maybe something nearby, and assured new users that they can visit communities and interact with users across instances, very few would pick the biggest instance.

      • _cnt0@feddit.de
        1·
        2 years ago

        That isn’t guaranteed, though. The other day I wanted to create a new community and was browsing instances on join-lemmy.org/instances for an instance that was compatible rulewise. The one I picked evidently wasn’t a good pick (burggit.moe). Trying to advertise my new community, I found out it was defederated from beehaw (and likely others) and got insulted as a pedophilia sympathizer …

        Randomly assigning new users to instances would make a substantial fraction of people very unhappy.

    • goat@burggit.moe
      1·
      2 years ago

      How’s it work if I get banned from one instance? Yet I can still comment in that instance I got banned from? No clue how that works

      • Barbarian@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        2 years ago

        If you get banned from your home instance, you’re banned everywhere.

        If you get banned on a different instance, you can no longer post/comment/vote in communities there but otherwise you’re fine.

      • Vlixz@lemmy.ml
        0·
        2 years ago

        Just joining in, and what will happen if the instance you created your account on decides to stop running. Does your account just dissapear?

        • RoosterBoy@lemm.ee
          01·
          2 years ago

          Yes. But it is easy as hell to set up on another instance or even throw up your own.

    • mangel@lemmy.ca
      1·
      2 years ago

      It’s also that lemmy.ml is the instance I’ve seen posted everywhere when it’s brought up, so naturally people would just sign up there instead of finding somewhere else.

    • Anon125@feddit.nl
      0·
      2 years ago

      I tried subscribing to a specific feddit.de community using Jerboa and I haven’t been able to yet. Not sure whether I’m misunderstanding something or whether that’s not possible.

        • Anon125@feddit.nl
          0·
          2 years ago

          I have an account and I’m logged in. I’m posting this from Jerboa. But it’s not a feddit.de account. Maybe I’m missing something.

          • RoosterBoy@lemm.ee
            01·
            2 years ago

            Jerboa search only finds communities that at least 1 person on your instance subscribed to, to find new communities from other instances easily I like to use https://browse.feddit.de/

            Then when you find a community, go to the web version of your instance (don’t worry it’s (mostly) mobile friendly) and type !name@instan.ce (don’t forget the !) Then you can subscribe there. Close and reopen Jerboa and your new community will show up in the list. The Jerboa devs are working on fixing this.

  • KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.world
    11·
    2 years ago

    Hello from lemmy.world! Don’t come here, I think it’s starting to get overloaded too. Lemmy.one looks like it may be in a good “growing but not snowballing yet” position, go over there and get that ball rolling.

  • Menachem@midwest.social
    151·
    2 years ago

    tbf people just wanna sign up and click on funny links, not browse through 100 rando instances to find the one that lines up with their exact interests and wait for approval and worry about uptime and whether their instance will still exist in a year

    • slashzero@hakbox.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      Very true. It would be sad to build up a persona on a smaller instance to then have it go dark and take your user with it. Other than losing your collection of “upvotes,” you can just recreate a new user with the same display name on another instance and keep going. 👍

      Holy crap, you can do Slack style emoticons? Huzzah! 🎉

    • lemillionsocks@beehaw.org
      3·
      2 years ago

      I feel that, while lemmy is still a work in progress, it is already pretty adequate for solving this need. If you want to subscribe to other instances you can do it from within your insance by going up to communities and searching. You can also click the all tab and see a bunch of instances from around lemmy that your instance is federated with.

      I think mastadon struggled with this because the twitter model is to follow people and depending how far removed the servers are this can be trickier. Compared to lemmy where people interested in a single subject will likely target and find the subject theyre interested in and bring themselves together naturally.

      Furthermore I think some people are splitting up and dividing into sub instances and tiny subjects a little prematurely. Reddit didnt get super esoteric with it’s subs until it got big and the larger subs either declined or got too noisy to talk about certain things. Like for example how beehaw has an operatingsystems instance instead of a linux, ubuntu, macos, windows, fedora, archinux, opensuse, openbsd, etc. Right now there arent enough of us that we dont need to subdivide.

        • Manticore@beehaw.org
          01·
          2 years ago

          I also like the beehaw has a mission for community in mind, supported by having an application process; and their having prepared umbrella communities that will prevent echo chambers.

          Beehaw is definitely getting hammered too though; it’s probably the second- or third-largest instance atm.

      • thegiddystitcher@beehaw.org
        4·
        2 years ago

        I’ve seen people literally signing up here just to make like 50 empty communities and not post or comment on anything at all. Definitely a lot of folks just trying to stake some territory that they think will be valuable in the future.

    • Sinnoh@feddit.deEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Let me see if I underatand this correctly:

      If I create an account on a random, small instance. And then go to the “all communities” feed. I can automatically see all communities that are in my instance. In addition to that, I can see all communities of other Lemmy instances, that are “federated”. But I cannot see other communities from other nstances, unless I go on there, find the communitis and manually subscribe to them (I believe there are other ways to get them to show up, like using the search etc.?)

      So, as a normal user. Who’s just looking for a replacement for /r/all, wouldn’t joining the largest lemmy instance that is fedarated to many others (Just by how many users it has, because it’s the users who link instances by their actions?) make perfect sense?

      • Yozul@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        The all communities tab should be showing you communities from every instance you are federated with. It’s true that they won’t show up in your feed until someone on your instance connects to the instance it’s on at least once, but you don’t need to be on a massive server to be connected to all the major communities right from the start.

        • MBM@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          This. There’s no need to join the biggest instance, as long as you’re not among an instance’s first users you won’t notice much difference.