A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
This reddit post likely has tens if not hundreds of thousands of views, look at the top comment.
Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.
What can we do?
imo this friction will erode as larger instances come into play; people will join a large, main instance without even knowing of the others, and-- if they have a problem with the instance they joined-- they'll find they can easily jump ship there.
whatever, just make a lemmy app that defaults to lemmy.world i guess
Bad choice, many new users specifically came here because of !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, which can't be accessed from lemmy.world.
A lot of disingenuous Lemmy users in that thread pretending that picking a server is more confusing than filing your taxes. I think join-lemmy should probably hot-list like 6 or 7 servers instead of making you choose via a primary interest, since you can migrate your account later anyway. But I am personally not tech oriented and managed to make an account and find an app without an issue.
The goal was never to convince people who don't know how email works to join, it's to convince an average reddit user to join.
How can people figure out email, but lemmy is just too complicated?
Because email federation is inherent to everyone's understanding of how that service works. And perhaps more importantly, email "instances" are run by corporations. Laymen are not signing up on a "server" or "instance," they're signing up for Google, Apple, or Microsoft - the service they get aligns to a company that provides it. Nearly every single service that anyone has ever signed up for online has followed the same essential process: go to fixed url, create id and password, gain access.
It's easy to underestimate, especially in communities like this, how enigmatic the entire infrastructure of the internet is to the general population. Think of those videos where people are asked what "the cloud" is: they pause and ponder and then guess "satellites?" because they've never even wondered about it. I'm guessing that for many people, something like Twitter is just something that lives in their app store that they can choose to "enable" on their phone by installing it.
People know that software is "made up of code," but they don't understand what that means. The idea that an "application" is a collection of services run by code, that there are app servers and web servers, that there are backends and frontends, is completely unknown to (I'd guess) a significant majority of people. And if someone doesn't understand that, it's honestly near impossible to understand what anything in the fediverse is.
And most importantly: this is not any user's fault. IT and the Internet developed so quickly, and it was made so seamlessly accessible by corporations who at first just wanted their services to be adopted, and then wanted everything even more deliberately opaque so those users were more likely to feel locked in and dependent while the services themselves tail-spun in degradation.
We need more, and more accessible, and friendlier, tech literacy in general. The complexity of our world is running away from us ("I have a foreboding [of a time...] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues" - Carl Sagan) and we simply can't deeply understand many of the things that directly impact us. But because of its ubiquity, IT may be the best chance people have of getting better at understanding.
Could there be an option for a sorting hat that could either: look at the redditor's post history and determine a good server for them or simply spin the wheel. Either way would get the lazies shit posting without them having to learn anything about fediverse. I know I would have just spun the wheel.
Maybe better TLDR of how it works will help people realise it doesn't matter too much which instance they pick
Which server do you want to use is like asking "Do you want Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo for email?" it really isn't that big of a deal, but maybe people these days have a hard time doing that too...
feels like old reddit
They obviously haven't visited https://old.lemmy.world/
I've gone on this diatribe about PIxelfed's onboarding process, where they have a website that says "This page will help find the perfect server for you" and then is designed to present as little meaningful information about each server as possible. Looking at join-lemmy.org, it's marginally better. "You can access all content from the Lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn't matter which you choose" 1. not strictly true and 2. if it doesn't matter why make the choice?
Here's a question I have, because I'm honestly not sure: Let's say most of the communities I'm personally interested in are on example.lol. But my account is on sh.itjust.works. How much am I burdening sh.itjust.works by mostly reading and posting to example.lol? Would I be decreasing people's operating costs if I just opened an account on example.lol so most of my interaction was on my home instance?
The one thing that I like about the fediverse is that it somehow unintentionally has a filter to keep the low effort people from poisoning the well.
I have been on the fediverse from 2019 and these types of arguments have been floated times and again at each exodus wave. they expect to be offered everything on a silver platter. they come into a new platform maintained by hobbyists and good will people and they expect it to offer the same features, experiences and user base or even better than the once on proprietary media that spend billions of dollars to acquire that user base. they get screwed by one company and hope that another for profit won't do the same. Lemmy is even easier than email, as you don't need to know the handle of people of communities you interact with you just search for them or explore the public feed. We don't need them here.
there are many aspects the fediverse can improve upon. decentralization or federation isn't one of them
Leave the micropenis guys alone, it's already a shit card to be dealt.
And they don't have to join. I really don't mean this in a dismissive way and respect their opinion. But why all this worrying about the need to have the fediverse dominate all social media? Maybe it's meant to be this way: your vibe decides your tribe. My vibe isn't commercial, toxic political talk, or influencers, thus my tribe is the fediverse instead of IG or Tiktok.
So my understanding from reading this (and other threads on Lemmy) is that:
-A majority of Lemmy users would rather the userbase remained small (in comparison to corporate social media and even compared to Mastodon).
-And a small but vocal minority wants to grow Lemmy to the point of being at least one of the choices, if not the de facto preferred alternative, on the mind of most Redditors who are sick of Reddit.
Is that accurate?
edit: formatting