People need to realize you can use alternatives
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
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.
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.
Good thing this is pretty pointless, since I can have the same community name in another instance.
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! 🎉
I created my own server...
Me too. Gonna close registrations at about 100 users. I don't want this to get expensive but I'll contribute what I can
Based on my previous experience running a Mastodon server, 90%+ of people are going to concentrate on already popular servers, especially the "official" one. I suppose I will also close (or be strict about) registration at some point myself, but I have a feeling I am not going to have to worry about it for a long time. My goal now is just to get some friends and acquaintances to join any lemmy instance, bonus points if it is mine.
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.
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.
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.
I tried to make an account on lemmy.ml and it looks like their servers are (understandably) overloaded
I ended up choosing lemmy.world instead
My understanding is I'm not missing out on anything by chosing a less-popular instance. Did I get that right?
yes!
lemmy.world in particular doesn't block any instances
see for comparison:
Oof, I can see why some of those instances are blocked, though. Since I'm on Beehaw, I checked their block list and...wow. Scrolled through each one for a few minutes and now I'm hoping I'm not on some kind FBI list for it. A few highlights from my research expedition:
I was only on each one for a minute or so. I don't think I'm missing out on anything except maybe being put on some kind of list.
First I created account there and then landed on my current instance, because lemmy.ml's admin views looks sketchy for me. Been living in ex-ussr for all my life I just cant accept all that communists and marxists and the fact that lemmy.ml has /c/Communism on it.
I know that's silly but that's why I'm not there anymore.
It's not silly at all. I also made an account there before realizing the admins are tankies. It honestly sketches me out about Lemmy in general considering they're the two lead (and currently only?) devs. Casts a big shadow over all of Lemmy when the devs are posting Xinjiang genocide denialism and their instance is at the top of the recommendations on join-lemmy.org. With lemmy.grad pretty high up there too.
Yeah that’s what Lemmy started out as. The thing is with all the Reddit refugees flooding in it is diluting out the tankies. Besides, lemmygrad.ml is blocked by many instances. As for the values of the devs the great thing is that Lemmy is FOSS so if they go rouge someone will just make a fork of Lemmy.
The documentation explaining how fediverse works is so bad. It's so long and convoluted anyone new just can't get bothered reading it.
I'm very tempted to switch to another instance, but from what I understand, you can't migrate your account like you can with Mastodon? That seems like something that should be expected with fediverse apps...
I think clarity on this or maybe a "roulette" of which instance on new user accounts would help. Most new users are Reddit refugees and just sign up to the mothership.
A roulette would be nice, the system balances the load of each instance. The downside of this is that it will negate the theme or purpose of the instance since the assigning of the members would likely be randomized instead of joining by choice of instance values and purpose.
I'm on .world because I had no idea which to join. Seems to be working just fine for me; I can see tons of posts from other places!
As someone who intentionally joined a different instance, the biggest issue is the “federation” doesn’t allow cross-authentication. Clicking a link to another instance moves me to that instance where I’m not logged in. Authentication should really be cross-instance.
I think this occurs because people haven't gotten used to linking to communities on other instances properly.
They usually post the direct link like beehaw.org/c/technology . Instead they should start using the federated link which is more instance agnostic like this: /c/technology@beehaw.org . This link will load the community from your instance.
FWIW, on a browser the /c/technology link you posted isn’t a hyperlink, so I can’t actually interact with it. It doesn’t work in mlem either.
Nah just register at whichever instance that sounds the coolest to append to your name. Just FYI I'm from programming.dev.
This is something that lemmy devs need to better address. This is an "Eternal September" kind of situation. People (me included) are not used to the fediverse. They think you can participate only if you're in that instance. And people want content, so they think "why's the instance with most people? Ahh lemmy.ml? Cool, let's join.
I chose lemmy.ml based on two things:
Still something that could help with the choosing-an-instance process is to display in the list of servers the community rules and if they are blocking certain communities.
When I first looked into Lemmy I thought picking an instance confined you to that instance. I think a lot of new people don't realize that isn't the case.
They need to do away with the ridiculous manual approval process on most servers and recommend servers that forego it on the main site.
99.99% don’t really want or understand a federated system. How do you know it’s not hosted on someone’s desktop over DSL? How do you know it will be there tomorrow? How do you know they aren’t modifying the code to do something nefarious?
As long as there’s a “main” instance people will prioritize that.
Idk why anyone would use the main instance and choose to be admined by pro-CCP tankies
I do really hope people are going to come to lemmy because this isn't half bad
I find it is nice to just join a server you enjoy at its core and then simply use the "all" sort of thing. I can see from other servers what is popular and can comment and upvote and downvote. It's all very seamless even if I am not in that home server
Yeah I have been finding it hard to wrap my head around this federation part.