this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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General Discussion
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Welcome to Lemmy.World General!
This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.
πͺ About Lemmy World
π§ Finding Communities
Feel free to ask here or over in: [email protected]!
Also keep an eye on:
For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!
π¬ Additional Discussion Focused Communities:
- [email protected] - Note this is for more serious discussions.
- [email protected] - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
- [email protected] - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
- [email protected] - Watched a movie and wanna talk to others about it? Here's a place to do so!
- [email protected] - Want to talk politics apart from political news? Here's a community for that!
Rules
Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.
0. See: Rules for Users.
- No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: even with βsillyβ questions. The world wonβt be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
- Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
- Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to [email protected] or [email protected] communities.
- No Ads/Spamming.
- No NSFW content.
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This is not a good thing. Part of the problem is third-party apps like Sync and other Fediverse advocates that direct Reddit users to sign up on only one instance, lemmy.world. This is understandable to keep things simple for the Redditors but it hurts lemmy.world (cost and performance-wise) and the Fediverse as a whole (centralization) to have a lot of accounts on one instance. I hope lemmy.world can make an announcement or guide to encourage users to spread out to more instances.
I think another reason too is that .world is run by Ruud who is a trusted actor in the space (he already runs Mastodon.world, a large mastodon instance), and so many (including me) probably felt it would be a safe harbor and not likely to get shut down or run poorly.
Maybe ony Lemmy.world's registration page thay can list other instances that they trust and endorse.
Not a bad idea. Might need assistance vetting servers and admins right now though as Ruud is probably busy taking a fire extinguisher to the server room every other minute.
This is a brilliant idea. Drive all the traffic to lemmy.world as it seems like the "main hub", then when registering drive users to a few other instances as well
Maybe we should set up a separate site that monitors different instances and tries to suggest instances in the federation group that you want and then everyone gets directed there.
I stumbled into lemmy disoriented and just went with lemmy.ca because I always want to support 'local' domains. I'm surprised people go for for something like '.world' tbh. Although, I think your logic makes sense I also know how little people read and its safer to say people just signed up for the instance that was the path of least resistance (low application threshold, links guiding them in, etc)
I scrolled through a few that were recommended and world seemed like it was just generally the best fit for me. Especially since I didnβt want any chance of running into explicitly queerphobic communities while having plenty of variety in topics
I made an account on both world and .CA while I was figuring things out.
I mostly use lemmy.ca now though.
I am waiting on my lemm.ee confirmation. Might daily drive it if it gets heavy here.
How is it possible to decentralise sign ups and see/searchable content and tabs? I used to be tech savvy but these days I struggle a bit. Turning into a dinosaur.
I have a "when I stop being bad at web development" project idea for this, hopefully someone who has a development background can pick it up.
The idea is an open-source onboarding portal that takes all Lemmy instances from awesome-lemmy-instances and Kbin instances from FediDB and lets their admins tag their instances with what the instance is focused on, maybe through a dedicated community or something. This list of instances and tags is public so instances can't cheat the system with fake tags or get secretly blacklisted just because the project maintainer disagrees with them.
Users get directed to the portal and fill out a quiz with questions like "what are your hobbies", "do you prefer strict or lax moderation", and get matched to a list of the closest servers and recommended communities. There will also be a simple load balancing algorithm to make large instances less likely to be recommended. Of course, because it's open source, the algorithm and list of instances can be changed if someone wants to host their own portal.
Basically, something like Spread Mastodon that covers the entire known network and not just a few of the largest instances that are approved by mastodon.social.
I like the idea and it sounds like a fantastic tool for people who would have been interested in the Fediverse anyway. I just fear taking a quiz is too cumbersome to be an optimal onboarding method for Lemmy as a Reddit replacement. The reason .world exploded in popularity was the simplicity (just go here and sign up and you're posting within minutes and your Local is the biggest instance so you're going to find content even if you've not discovered the All button).
Doesn't every major social media website have an onboarding quiz these days? Whenever I created an alt on Reddit or Twitter, there would be this prompt asking me what I'm interested in, then it would recommend subreddits/accounts/hashtags to follow. I know Facebook and Instagram prompt for your contacts and interests to generate recommendations too. If the average social media user can manage this, so can future Threadiverse users.
Find instances on https://join-lemmy.org
Find subs (communities) on https://browse.feddit.de
These are great suggestions, but for finding communities, I would recommend https://lemmyverse.net/communities instead.
The Interface is nicer, you can directly get the [email protected] string for searching it locally, and it doesn't use a large blocklist like feddit.de sadly does.
I think we're trusting them to crunch the numbers and simply shut off registration if it gets out of control. At least, I'd hope so.
That wouldn't be good either if third parties are still funnelling new users to lemmy.world. They'll see a "sign ups closed" message, assume there is only one forum and it's closed, then go back to Reddit.
Actually it's even worse than that. I tried yesterday to register on https://lemmy.ml but it let me go through the registration process up to the submit button before returning an error message "Registration Closed".
A necessary evil but one that can be overcome. I would hope there'd be a way to leave a message about trying one of many other instances or at least a link to a Fediverse FAQ.
Some degree of centralization is inevitable. I think it may be 2-4 main instances that people will predominately use.
I know that it's inevitable, but the signup flow should try to weaken that effect instead of contribute to it. An example of how not to do it is Mastodon's old homepage which led to only one instance, mastodon.social, to "make onboarding easier".