People need to realize you can use alternatives
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.
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 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.
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.
The documentation explaining how fediverse works is so bad. It's so long and convoluted anyone new just can't be bothered reading it.
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.
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!
Idk why anyone would use the main instance and choose to be admined by pro-CCP tankies
They need to do away with the ridiculous manual approval process on most servers and recommend servers that forego it on the main site.
New feddit.de user reporting in
Ze Germans seem to have their own monopolistic instance
I do really hope people are going to come to lemmy because this isn't half bad
I created my account at sh.itjust.works but I don't fully understand Lemmy yet. Finding communities seems confusing.
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
I don't think I spent more than 10 minutes total in /r/all in my 12 years of Reddit, so it's quite nice to browse all here and not be bombarded with rubbish.
Well, hello from feddit.de! Since I'm a german user I thought it'd be only logical to register on a german instance. While new registrations are semi-locked, the criteria for being let in are quite easy to pass and they are mostly in place to filter out spam. Got my account approved right on the next day
Yeah I have been finding it hard to wrap my head around this federation part.
I just hope it lasts, worst thing would be if people just went back to reddit
proudly hailing from NOT lemmy.ml 🤗
