this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Part of the problem is that when a new user starts exploring Lemmy, they see the list of "most popular instances" and are inclined to gravitate towards them, when it's really not necessary to join them to interact with them... As a recent Reddit refugee, that was what I struggled with the most.
Honestly I joined lemmy.ml because it had the description that most closely matched my interests without feeling like I'm joining one single person's home lab experiment. I think we would need a few more large general purpose (vanilla) instances.
On the other hand I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to condense communities/topics into single, topic-specialized servers. I can't imagine, from a UI perspective subscribing to 100 different news communities and another 100 gaming communities and... I feel like the current UI just isn't designed with this in mind.
It'd definitely be neat if there was a way to group those similar communities into single, shared communities between federated instances. Like, if 6 different instances have "Gaming" communities, to have them all effectively grouped into a single one, and also include the "Gaming" communities from any other instances that you federate with in the future.
I think the ideal UX would be to be able to see one "Gaming" community, subscribe to it, and check a box for "Include Similar Federated Communities" or something, and have posts from all of them show up in your feed, without having to individually subscribe to them.
I see an important hurdle to that: moderation rules are still specific to instances. So "multis" create some side effect UI challenges. In fact I think the current UI lacks reminders about which community you are participating in.
But I really like and support your "Include Similar Federated Communities" suggestion.
That's a great point about moderation rules; I hadn't considered that... I suppose that does make it difficult.
I feel some of the regional instances are the best. I.e. I'm on lemmy.ca but can clearly read and post to the other instances. That way the load can be somewhat split on geography.. likely better speeds as well.
Contributions welcome: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site
Perhaps instances should be promoted according to current and predicted capacity.
That'd be great. Or even show a list of communities, rather than instances, and let the user find some communities that interest them first, then gravitate towards an instance from there (though that might not solve the problem if the most popular communities are from the most popular instances.)
Could even promote smaller instances that are federated with the popular instances, instead of promoting the popular instances directly.
Making the understanding of lemmy's internal infrastructure incumbent upon users seems a bit ... clunky. I work in IT, I get why it works this way, but I don't see how making it so apparent it serves any benefit to users.
If any user can participate in any community regardless of instance, does anything matter other than instance capacity? The sign up could just automatically select an instance on that basis (but also provide the user the option to select one manually).
I think the main thing about instance being important is the instance moderation and federation choices. Some people will of course want as hands off as possible, but some instances are certainly not that (one is very explicitly communist for instance IIRC). So ideally you'd pick an instance that fits your moderation goals, followed by one that you have some other affinity for - like the gaming idea. I joined sopuli because of it being Finnish and I have that heritage, even as an American. I also like not having everything hosted in the US so...
I could also easily see some people having multiple identities tied to instance interests. I suggested it would be nice if /r/sysadmin here at /c/sysadmin was not a community on lemmy.ml but actually its own instance, perhaps trying to pull in /r/networking, /r/sysadminjobs, /r/linuxadmin etc. Not only is that more likely to be work related, so you want a "work" identity, but it seems like you'd have the benefit of a group of communities filling the frontpage of the instance with stuff you're likely interested in.
I see this a bit with mastadon with a journo.host vs an infosec.exchange vs my generic vivaldi.social account.
I started a networking community on my local… let’s gooooooooo!
I still see benefits to strong instance identity, it can lead to some interesting dynamics down the line.
But it needs to come with a smooth onboarding process, paired with the ability to easily migrate your account to a new instance with no loss of account history. That second thing also helps with the first one, if you can easily transfer, the choice of instance is much less critical as a user.
Such as?
Totally agree. Like I said, I think the instance should be selected automatically (or at least promoted) by available capacity. It could just sort the list by user count to start and maybe start collecting some performance telemetry on instances to fine tune it later.
The account history is a big one, too. It could even be as simple as having the ability to download/upload your account history in a zip file, then it also serves as a backup. You could even schedule it regularly with the right bot or browser extension.
Another thing I just thought of while I was replying to this is that would be really nice to have is cross-instance authentication. It's kind of annoying when I go to a message context, but then I have to go back and find the message in my inbox to reply.
So many things could happen, it will be an organic process of evolution. Let's say communities end up consolidating (e.g. one of the gaming communities becomes the prevalent one), then the server that has the super successful community, how will that affect it? Will people want to be on that server because of that community? Will people prefer to use a server that stays topic-agnostic but maybe offers a strong identity (vibe, political leaning, geographic, etc etc) and that's what attracts users?
Maybe those servers don't even have any of the usual suspect of communities, because it's expected the users will go subscribe to the popular one. Maybe it only offers local info threads, or open format / ideology guided discussions.
Or on the other hand will we see more and more specialized servers that are focused around a set of communities from a specific field?
I guess I'm just wondering how it will all fall into place after there is massive growth, it'll definitely be an interesting part of human behavior to observe.
Yeah that is a big one indeed, I was very confused at first why clicking on some links wouldn't work how I expected it to until I realized there were some hard links that would take you to that server's page directly, and since you're not a user there ofc you're not logged in. That could be better.
What we need is a big disclaimer text with a step by step and requests for choosing from less populated servers.
That text needs to be present at every single point of the user journey, not just once.
I tried like 4 or 5 instanced before settling on lemmy.ml a few days ago because none of them had admissions open.
@LoreleiSankTheShip @Obi, Lemmy is fine, but also Mastodon with a lot of instances