I’ve seen lots of discussion on reddit of users trying to get others to join Lemmy and the prevailing reply is that it is too difficult to navigate and comprehend. Having to answer multiple questions and wait for manual verification is combersome and is limiting growth at a time when nothing should be standing in Lemmy’s way. Combine this with server/instance selection analysis paralysis, and you get my point.
The linked mastodon blog post sums up my thoughts, but the TLDR is essentially this:
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don’t let dreams of decentralization interfere with the greater goal of achieving the network effect.
We should all be telling people to go to lemmy.ml and sign up. The devs should be too, and they should rethink/remove the questions and waiting period. Hell, just put a captcha. Discussions about servers and analogies to email as an example of federated service we all already use is a waste of breath. We shouldn’t have barriers to entry.
Thoughts?
EDIT: I’ve just found kbin.social and find it has superior signup options. It’s just: make an account (email/password), or sign up with Google or Apple. No server talk. Upside is the layout is nice and it acts as a Lemmy instance (threads) as well as a mastodon instance (microblogging). Only downside currently is that their android/iOS app is in development and isn’t ready yet, so desktop only.
https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
I think this might be the better recommendation for newbies at the moment.
I think the way Mastodon is handling new users is pretty problematic. Not only did this lead to huge amounts of spam on the network because Eugen’s instance couldn’t handle the amount of new users, but also this goes against the very idea of federation.
Unpopular opinion: if finding an instance is too hard for you, maybe the federated internet just isn’t for you. I see people on reddit still complaining about how difficult Mastodon is, and I’m sorry but if that’s too complicated for you, just stay on reddit. Considering the level of discourse of both sites, I think it’s a feature, not a bug.
I think the main problem here is that there isn’t a really accessible explanation of federation and how these social platforms differ from the other, larger options. There is lots of great documentation for interested users to acquaint themselves with, but it would be beneficial to have a more ‘elevator pitch’ version that can get people moving through the signup process with more confidence. Even just a short message saying: “hey, choosing your instance isn’t as important as it looks right now, you’ll be able to freely use any other instance once you sign up” could go a long way towards making on-boarding much smoother. Once a user is in the system, they can learn what details they care about through osmosis for the most part.
I do think that having a default instance would help with streamlining the on-boarding process, but I don’t think that the idea aligns with the values of lemmy as a whole. It’s important to keep services decentralized in order to keep things free and open.
A default instance would help people signup more easily, but afaik there’s currently no way to migrate to another instance right? So this approach already causes problems on Mastodon but it seems like it would be even worse over here due to people then being “trapped” on whatever the default is.
I personally look at federation like email. Doesn’t matter if I am using a Hotmail email address. I can still talk to everyone over at gmail, icloud, yahoo, Comcast etc…
email is the original federation service.
As a person new to federations, I have to admit that the mail analogy doesn’t really answer or clarify much. Who decides what gets to go into a federation? Should everyone be in a single federation since otherwise there is no communication? Do I need a separate account per federation? Whats the practical limit on number of instances per federation?
I think first of all we need a really good FAQ.
I think you’re getting hung up on the word “federations” (noun) instead of the adjective “federated”.
Who decides who gets to email who? The email provider admins. Should everyone be in a single email network/bubble since otherwise there is no communication? Mostly, yes. Do I need a separate account per email bubble? Per email bubble? Yes. But how many email bubbles are there? One? Whats the practical limit on number of providers per the email world? None, mostly?
Gmail does ban a lot of small email providers if they don’t seem “legit” enough. And that is where you’re onto something with the noun federations.
If a bunch of instances really disliked a different bunch of instances they can indeed severe each other from each other. The admins would do that. They put the other instances on a block list. Most Mastodon instances block Trump’s Lie ehm Truth Social etc. But otherwise you can talk from gmail to hotmail to mcselfhost, with one account.
Basically federation works based on a block-list, not a allow-list, unless the admins of the instance set it that way, just like email providers.
I think first of all we need a really good FAQ.
I think you’re right. For example, I’m still unclear about communities across different servers. is /c/gaming showing me everyone’s posts to /c/gaming, or just those from my own server? If I search for a community, will I see the results even if there’s no instance of that community on my own server?
I agree with everyone saying this is critical to the success of the platform. It shouldn’t take research to understand what you’re signing up for, at least if anyone wants to see success in picking up where reddit left off.
To answer the question, communities are server specific. There are 2 separate gaming communities on lemmy.ml and beehaw.org that I know of, and probably more by now.
About needing better documentation, I could not agree more! It’s very understandable considering that just 3 days ago this was a place with 1k users at peak and 2 devs plugging away at improving the framework. This is an open source project, so be the change you want to see (not directed specifically at you, that’s for everyone). We can make this whatever we want, but people need to put in work. Been trying to answer as many questions as I can reasonably answer for a few hours now :)
communities are server specific
Thanks for the info. I was actually under the impression that the opposite was true. Wouldn’t that heavily incentivize joining an already popular server?
No, because being on a different server does not impede you in the slightest from subbing, posting and commenting in the more popular one. Think of it as the difference between /r/gaming and /r/truegaming. Same subject, different communities.
Oh I see, so even if the community is hosted on a different server, I can still search for and sub it. It just gets dicey if there are multiple instances of the same community on different servers. I guess then that’s something that needs to be mitigated too, and I’ve seen other folks in this thread talking about fragmentation. Again, thanks for the info.
I will say there’s a spark here that’s been missing from reddit for a long time. Similar to how reddit felt before the digg folks came over. I’m enjoying it!
i like mastodon’s approach - its clean, simple, and easy to understand.
i think the fediverse is just a very hard concept for people to wrap their heads around if they aren’t internet savvy or already knowledgable on these things. i think in general there needs to be an easier way to fully explain what it is and get it across to people.
lemmy should def adopt something similar here to mastodon. i think having a default server is smart and probably the right move (with the “Pick your own server” option or something similar right below, just like what Mastodon is doing, so users easily have the option), HOWEVER i think before that happens, lemmy does need to allow migrating and moving servers, and ik lemmy.ml is being overloaded really badly rn in general, so those issues probably need to be sorted too.
I think they need an easy wizard, some way to guide users to an instance they could use to sign in. Ask a couple questions and then bam here you are. The biggest issue then is "Well you don’t go here to sign in now you use this url. " lemmy could add some sort of redirect though for known people?
A wiki for new users would be super helpful. It took me a couple of tries to even get to the account creation stage from a baseline of “not knowing anything about federated content”
A quick video on the homepage, professionally done would be really useful too. One of those snappy 1min videos on how to sign up, and what federated means with lots of animations.
There’s a reason those types of videos are everywhere, they work well
It should be by geolocation/language and to not confuse people, the instance should be a lemmy.xx domain by default.
You can’t have a default server unless someone is ready to pay for it. (Idk how Mastodon does it.)
What I’d do is:
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have every instance list its most prevalent topics/communities/interests (technology, games, communism, memes…)
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when the user is signing up, have them select their interests
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try to find the ideal match. Let the user override if they want to, perhaps let them know if the community is tiny, requires approval etc, but other than that just show a “suggested instance: example.org, change link”
Mastodon is a company. A non-profit one, but they’ve had enough donations and funding for a while now to draw salaries for multiple people to the point that they were hiring earlier this year. The head of Mastodon even calls themselves the “CEO”! All of the instances that use mastodon software have to rely on their own donations from their own users. But mastodon, the central company, have enough money to hire and pay employees and run their own largest instance (by a long way) on the fediverse (which is not coincidentally the default instance to join in the app).
This is why it’s insidious that they’re brand has become so pervasive to the point where most don’t know about the fediverse, only mastodon. It’s heading toward a form of re-centralisation of some sort. And, with the current rate of user growth (checkout https://fedidb.org/), the majority of english-speaking mastodon users may in not too long a time be all on one central instance.
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to be an active part of all those integrated fediverse parts you have to set up several accounts for each part, not only for kbin.
Actually, /kbin is explicitly made to make you able to actively interact both with Mastodon (and other microblogs) and Lemmy.
I already have Mastodon accounts, but kbin is looking like a very attractive middle ground for being able to interact with a lot of different fedi types. I am just not a fan of how it thinks upvote means boost.
It will be changed next week.
