Whenever barrier to entry is discussed for lemmy, and reducing confusion for different servers is brought up, all of the isolationist comments come out of the woodwork.
Apparently redditors who are too dumb to register should stay on reddit?
We have a platform that seems to be working and slowly growing. Shouldnt we want good defaults in place to give the best possible experience with minimal user effort?
My comments in other threads are not intended to be isolationist, and when I reas others I fear you misconstrue many.
We are not saying “let them stay on Reddit and other corporate media”. We are saying “teach them, preach the benefit, and when they want to come, and are ready to come, they will.”
That is how you nurture a growing community, vs “make line go up.”
We need to build a space for them to migrate into. Most of what I see on Lemmy is, frankly, whiny. If we want to grow we need to set a better example.
Personally, I think the big thing is that we need a tool to see who is defederated from who. We don’t want some poor sod somehow thinking that since they are leftist that Hexbear or Lemmygrad would be a good place for them.
Yeah agreed. Who am i cutting out by joining this instance
Here is a tool to see federated status of instances.
My only concern is this place is mostly friendly, as with Mastodon, I wouldn’t like that to change.
Having said that, I have never found lemmmygrad or Hexbear that bad.
I think as long as they don’t all come at once, but in a more staggered, September style, then we should be able to handle them with moderation.
Some more people are going to need to volunteer to mod, though.
This isn’t a lemmy only thing.
Seen this since the 90’s and the start of Eternal September. ‘How dare we change or help these constant Lusers show up. How DARE we allow for differing opinions. Our way is the ONLY right way! Why should we allow this CANCER to infect us?’
To further emphasize that point: I’m part of a tilde community. I have been working on a migration document highlighting services and other options for social media migrants. The local newsgroup is sparcely populated. So the one technical guy that’s a frequent poster had this to say:
I think these followers and likes counters’ places unleash the wrong attitude. People write stuff to collect these by pleasing the potential reader instead of writing just facts. Fights over points and factually wrong answers that gained a lot of up-votes drove me away from reddit and SE. Some even write BS and get terribly upset if you point them to a man page that contradicts their statements.
Communication media should fit the job. Chats be volatile and fast while mail, mailing lists and news are allowing detailed discussions in long articles.
Sending people from twitXter or FB to Mastodon does not help them evolve. It just gives addicts a supposedly more free variant of their drug instead of getting them away from it.
Less is more!
The isolationists are wrong, and to me would rather watch the world burn for the sake of being proven right in their isolation than to help people.
I miss being able to subscribe to posts. That’s a good Reddit feature that I think we’re missing.
I dont think i ever used that on reddit. I dont expect volunteer devs to meet my list of demands to make lemmy like reddit, i just want ideas like this to be considered by their merit instead of community members shitting on stuff solely because reddit is doing it and “we arent reddit”.
What I’ve seen many times is people stating the opinion that we don’t need to grow. We’re not some big commercial platform and we don’t need to satisfy some investors. Growth will come naturally. Or it won’t.
My opinion is, judging by the numbers… We aren’t growing for quite some time now, so Lemmy will most likely stay what it is. I’d love if it were a super attractive place, though. And everybody would like to join.
Sane defaults are always a good idea. I’m a bit split on the “minimal effort” though. Minimal effort is letting some algorithms dictate what to consume, simple truths, and not bothering with complicated stuff like freedom or privacy.
I dont understand whats different about starting from nothing and curating your feeds… versus starting from a good default and curating your feeds.
“Professional users” can disable or customize however they want. And it seems like a new user thing anyways… where established users wouldnt even notice a difference.
Its literally just a more compelling starting point.
I think proving that we dont need to be big commercial platform to be a big platform is an important milestone for foss. Big platforms should appeal to the masses. Any instance that wants to break off is obviously fine but when we are talking about the popular entry points to lemmy… thats where we should not be elitest.
Thanks for your comment.
Hmmh, I don’t think it’s even elitism in this case. Feels to me like something else. But I’m the wrong person to ask, since I do not share that opinion.
I think your proposal with default subscriptions (or whatever it is exactly) is a solid idea, though. In fact, I’ve heard some people scroll through the “All” feed here on Lemmy and subsequently block the things they’re not interested in. I’d say that’s about the same direction. And I mean why not? We also have sorting by popular, and things are popular for a reason. So we might as well subscribe new users to the 10 most popular communities.
It’s a bit more complicated than just that, we’d have to take some care not to entirely destroy diversity and pour some cement over the whole thing, or we end up with a small echo chamber of just lemmy.world and AskLemmy and NoStupidQuestions… But I guess there might be some solution in beween the extremes. And things might change due to the size of the platform. An “All” feed might still be useful at our current size, but might prove to become infeasable once we grow.
I think we were growing and then the election cycle happened.
Kind of wish lemmy happened a decade earlier before all the constant rage.
A decade ago I don’t think the circumstances would have allowed lemmy to exist because reddit was still in its growing phase and it was not as commonly known and appreciated as it is today.
It would have been cool to develop lemmy like that but I think now is the right time for people to realise why lemmy should exist.
I don’t think this is the case. Judging by the statistics, we’ve peaked in 2023 and we’ve been on the decline since. And now we’ve pretty much homed in somewhere between 40k and 50k active users. But that’s way too early to be connected to the election cycle. But good question what would have happened if it had been around earlier. I suppose the Fediverse isn’t even that young. We had predecessors of the current platforms in the early 2010s already. And it’s been roughly 10 years since Mastodon got launched and ActivityPub got standardized.
I found the enrollment pretty straightforward when I joined. The page I found when googling “join lemmy” listed the major instances and shortly summarized the concept of federation. I don’t think even mildly tech savvy people would have an issue enrolling but it’d definitely confuse my eighty year old mom.
Currently, it seems most Lemmy users are very technically inclined, there are a lot of software devs and sysadmins. I certainly don’t mind that, but I would love to see a more diverse demographic. I do feel like some people here seem to think that technical knowledge strongly correlates with the ability to have intelligent discussions, which I don’t.
How dare you assume we are all software devs or sys admins!!
… I am a software dev though hahaha ;p
Jokes aside, i agree. We are all humans and diversity is important so we dont alienate ourselves to the outside world and create echo chambers.How dare you assume we are all software devs or sys admins!!
Yes indeed!
Lol same and you reminded me of this scene from men in black 3: https://youtu.be/GNOZhAc26I8
As a sysadmin, I must second the claim that we are surely not all software devs and sysadmins.
…Right?
Token math/systems-illiterate humanities person here, glad to be of service.
I can talk to computers but not people, we need all kinds here 🥳
I’m something of a technophobe. If I can figure it out most should be able to.
I’m mechanically inclined, worked on cars profesionally for a few years, been in manufacturing for over ten years now. I can research enough to get around a linux terminal, but I learned compuers on apple IIe and commodore 64.
Lemmy is undeniably smaller but it feels a lot more free, like I’m not walking on eggshells when posting here.
On Reddit I have to mince my words on a lot of subs and be careful about using certain words, lest I want Automoderator to effectively shadowban me. Reddit is ruled by tyrannical power mod assholes who likely got slammed into lockers and beaten for their lunch money in high school, and are now using their role as an internet janitor to exert a repressed power fantasy. And don’t get me started on the Tintin-looking supreme cuck who owns Reddit Inc either.
Put it this way, Lemmy is a place where you can post about Luigi Mangione, or about the people involved in Elon Musk’s DOGE operation without risking a ban.
I haven’t seen many comments not wanting people to join but more like, we are fine even if they don’t.
When I joined lemmy, I found it to be rather easy, so I never understood this barrier to entry.
I think it’s because someone just linked me to an instance, so I just went there and signed up like a regular site.
Ideally we want more users and for the fediverse to hit critical mass but idk how that can ever happen when corporate social media sites will always have a marketing budget.
So imo it’s not the difficulty, it’s like wondering why people keep paying for certain software when there are free alternatives, cause corporate software will always be more dumbed down.
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Diversity is paramount for social media, otherwise it becomes an echo chamber or worse.
Say what you will about the average redditor, but remember at a certain point they’re just the average person.
I mean, love me some Linux nerds and Germans as much as the rest of you but lemmy needs more.
Sure, but at the same time all of the worst comments I’ve seen have been from instances that were mainly linked to from reddit i.e. lemmy.world. Like, rage inducing misinformation. I prefer the much higher quality of discussions on lemmy which I would rarely see on reddit, but it is tiring seeing linux lotr star trek politics be 99.9% of the content / discussions…
Check out [email protected] … people there are actively thinking about ways to help people migrate. To some extent also [email protected]
I don’t think the barrier to entry is all that bad… if you install Jerboa or Boost you’re immediately presented with Lemmy content without worrying about creating an account… then you can get a feel for whether you like it or not.
It’s only a problem if someone is told they must choose a server and create an account to see Lemmy content at all. Ideally people would just be pointed to a server and told to select “Scaled” to get a sense of the smaller communities…
Thank you for posting it!
In my opinion, everyone who is like “we only want more people who understand the fediverse” are stupid.
How are people supposed to learn and understand the fediverse if they don’t try it?
The more people we get off of corporate bullshit, the better.
☝️🤓
Everyone who is like “we only want more people who understand the fediverse”
areis stupid.Everyone are stupid❌Everyone is stupid ✅
Do not question my ability to England.
My England is very good quality.
I’ll admit that I don’t really understand it and I’ve been here since the start on various accounts over various instances. I don’t want to understand it, either.
I never got on with mastodon, nor really any of the other fediverse other than Lemmy. Simply because I never used their corporate counterparts. I also don’t really care about other instances within Lemmy. I hate the politics between them. Though I understand why it exists, it makes this place much less enjoyable due to the hostility.
I’m just here to keep me off Reddit because I’d been there so long that it became hard to walk away. Lemmy feeds that addiction, but it doesn’t provide the wealth of information that was readily available on modern Reddit. It feels a lot like old Reddit but with less rage comic and animal advice memes.
We just need to send them to a neutral instance and teach them the damn rules, especially about switching instances so they can go be in a place that fits their style. I vote Lemm.ee, as I agree with their “Administration, moderation, and federation policy”, and their site wide rules:
- No abusive language
- No bigotry
- No advertising
- No pornography
Who’s “we”? I don’t run a lemmy instance. I’m not against new users. I’m also not opposed to a lot of hard work and money going into making the experience better, but since I’m not providing either - who’s “we”?
Lemmy.world users, and maybe other instances.
Its not about demanding new features from people who volunteer their time and money, its about the community being understood and maybe having some consesus about what we’d like to see because i do imagine the people who manage this instance care about what users want.
And its nice to talk about these things directly instead of having people speaking for the instance in a hundred conflicting ways in random posts.
Broader adoption of lemmy ensures more longevity, and likely better, more diverse development. Ignore the haters. Everyone was new here at some point and the last thing we should do is pull up the ladder behind us.
Change is good. Change is life. People who oppose change for its own sake are in favor of stagnation.
There are a LOT of haters though
I’m one of those, and km not against it.
Seems like a pretty tiny minority you’re talking about.
I got my instance, but I’m not really sure how to handle it if people started living on it :-)
It’s all my hardware on a gigabit fiber link. Any advice greatly appreciated.
