24
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
24 points (74.0% liked)
Fedigrow
731 readers
69 users here now
To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federated your community to a lot of instances
founded 8 months ago
MODERATORS
Owners and Guides
One or more admins may run it if they came to an agreement. A capable admin or group of admins would have to put their hands up, but this is no different from any other instance.
As for paying and modding of the instance, the Onboarding Instance should come into existence through an organised Collective of existing and willing admins/mods/longtermusers from a range of Instances.
These are likely the people with the best experience to disseminate to new users. So would be important to take on the guiding roles needed in the onboarding instance communities, even if they have no technical oversight of the instance.
The payoffs
General growth of Lemmy, whats good for one is good for all. A large, and stable Lemmy user base will help give this network ongoing strength.
New users filtration into appropriate instances may temper the rapid expansion and domination of the majors like lemmy.world. While increasing the likelihood of users sticking around because they have found their place and have a clearer understanding. I suppose this also has a bonus of decreasing work for admins, eg, deleting users accounts and the like.
Own Instance growth. Some new users will inevitably filter through to your own instance. Assuming your instance takes new users.
Finally
Setting something like this up, i see, as an acceptance that Lemmy is hard to wrap your head around. And we as a network of disparate Instances can better organise ourselves in a mission to help the new-comers growing Lemmy.
When you think about it, Lemmy.world is currently the sandbox. And even though a few people leave every time LW makes a debatable move (piracy communities, not defederating Threads, vegan cat food modifying the ToS, reminding people that hate speech is a thing in European laws, the most recent "flat earthers welcome" policy change), a lot of the people are still there, while they should probably be looking for another place.
But people don't like to move. That's also why the vast majority of people is still on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
Yeah i agree, LW seems to be the defacto sandbox.
So the issue with LW is users history becomes a barrier to exit. An onboarding instance needs to make clear that it is an introductory instance for newcomers to discover and learn lemmy. That they are expected to move off the Instance within, for instance, a month or two.
If new users expectations are set to understand this, their investment in the profile itself will be lower.
You could disable themeing attributes like usernames and icons for users to make clear the transitory nature of their user profile. I'm not sure i'm fully there with that, but it could be a useful tactic. Replace usernames with a number for instance, or NewUser8000@onboardinginstanceY.com
That really seems unwelcoming
Not really, because the very people who will be telling them this is an 'onboarding instance, we eventually want you to choose another instance and move there', will also be the ones telling them all about the possible instances the new comers can move to.
Maybe its a bit like an orientation at a university. They are specifically not the same as the courses students will eventually attend, the orientation (onboarding instance) has a different purpose to the course (home instance). You may meet people you'll never see again, the guides role isn't to be the course lecturers/administrators (analogous in this case to mods/admins) that you'll interact with throughout your course.
There might be a little passing sadness if you get to the end of orientation if you've had a very enjoyable experience, but the student (user) has expected the end, they've known when and why its coming. And hopefully if they've enjoyed the experience on the onboarding instance that much, they are that much more excited for the next steps.