Fediverse

Also remember to be nice. I see heated arguments regressing into ad hominems by the third comment pretty regularly. We can be better than Reddit

I'm doing my small part.

Went from 100% lurker on Reddit to regularly active lemmy commenter

The userbase here is quite technical so there are many of you able to contribute.

As a project manager, I can help by ballooning the scope and setting the deadline to yesterday! Doing my part!

I don't have much to say, but thank you for working on lemmy all these years.

I can complain about it a lot sometimes, but I'm very grateful for both the communities and the developers that kickstarted the fediverse, and for free too! So, thank you ❤️

If you or other people want to discuss the development of fedisoftware for beginners, or just growing as a whole you and everyone else are more than welcome at !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com!

I don't really agree that it's much easier to start on Reddit. Especially nowadays.

-Post from an IP that was once used by a banned account? Also banned (after first being shadowbanned)

-Try to post in any niche sub of your choosing after making an account? Forget it, wait three weeks and farm 3K karma first (which encourages shitposting and reposting, lowering quality)

-Deviate a fraction of an inch from whatever sub's 500-page rulebook? Banned.

-Try to argue an unbanning? That's a permanent mute.

-Post anything - and I do mean anything - in a "wrong" sub, get immediately permabanned by a slew of subs you didn't even know existed.

-Some mod doesn't agree with something you posted? Even if it was 5 years ago in a sub that has since been deleted? Banned and muted.

Reddit is an absolutely terrible experience for new posters. How they even manage to retain a tenth of them is beyond me. I encourage them to keep it up however, more traffic for Lemmy.

I'm the OP of one of the posts that blew up about UX.

This is great news, I will look into building something like join-lemmy/onboarding that could guide users, or improving join-lemmy

I can confirm. These guys are very open to pull requests that improve the platform.

Good post

Also, !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com for people who want to help promoting Lemmy Mbin Piefed

All this said, there have also been some suggestions to make onboarding easier by directing new users to a hardcoded default instance. This may sound like a good idea at first but won't work well in practice. Running such an instance would take significant time for administration and moderation, but we maintainers are already too busy. Besides it would be impossible to reach an agreement who this default instance should federate with or how exactly it should be moderated. So if you want to get nontechnical users to Lemmy, the solution is to link them directly to a specific instance based on their interests.

Wholeheartedly agree with this. Also people should get use to taking responsibility for their online experiences. Corporations have made people stupid to the point they reject autonomy.

My proposal have been a little more complicated, but IMO works well for a BFU:

• create some set of rules for "default instances" - every instance that wants to be in the list must follow them and will be periodically checked
  • I don't have any particular rules in mind, but some examples might include active moderation team, obviously registrations being open and if you really want to make it easy, either no application question or having it automatically approved by an automod of some kind
• on join-lemmy, present a registration form that will create an account on a randomly selected instance from the pool and redirect there afterwards
• there should be a link somewhere for "experts" where you could link to the current wizard

I'm willing to work on this if we can sit down and agree on the criteria for the pool. I can also ask my UX guy to help a little.

Feel free to text me here or on Matrix if this is something you think is worth pursuing. I'd also appreciate if you let me know it's not the direction you want to go in.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the effort to make joining Lemmy easier has some downsides. One of the nicest things about these communities is how easy it is to have good conversations with internet strangers. I’ve grown to appreciate and hope for Lemmy not trying to be a Reddit replacement. In fact, I’m totally fine with “the masses” staying in Spez’s data harvesting machine. If, one day, Lemmy gets as popular as Reddit, I think it will inevitably have many of the same problems. It just theoretically won’t be selling your data for profit (one hopes, anyway). My wife isn’t super-techy, and I explained the concept of Lemmy to my wife in about 10 minutes. She set up an account in about 5.

To me, it’s not that using or joining Lemmy is hard. It’s that a lot of people have come to loathe change. They’re told that Lemmy is “like Reddit,” so why leave Reddit, all their accumulated Internet points, and their familiar communities/echo chambers? Pretty much all of them also use other data-harvesting social media sites, so they mostly don’t care about that aspect. When I tell my friends about Lemmy I talk about how the size of the communities is really conducive to good conversations from wide enough ranges of opinions and experiences, compared to Reddit’s too much of everything including trolls.

Hey if an old guy like me can figure it out its not hard .

I have nothing to add except I hope you're still enjoying Lord of the Rings.