Fediverse

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

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.

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.

I don't think that Reddit is so much better. The interface at the moment is full of ads that make i confusing. The only thing is the community search that is a bit cumbersome, but this is due to federation, and understood. On the other hand the federation with Mastodon/Friendica/whatever is super-powerful, hand honestly enjoyable

Thank you for all your work

Let's all be clear, Reddit is part of the surveillance state.

You can't log in without Google and Apple trackers being allowed. New Reddit has recapcha trackers on every page. Only old.reddit doesn't track what you see, just what you write.

Your thoughts and content belong to a publicly traded company focused on profits if you use reddit.

As someone who is "stuck" here after being permabanned on all accounts on reddit I can say that the number one "issue" Lemmy has is also the greatest part about Lemmy. The fact that every instance can have its own copy of the "same" sub.

I completely understand why someone coming from reddit is going to search up "ask" and they will see a few ask Lemmy subs coming up. At a glance they won't know which one is "better" and why there are multiple.

Sadly most people will turn around and leave at that point. The average internet user will just go somewhere else the moment they feel lost or confused by anything. The few that might stick through it and make a post asking why there are multiple instances of the same type of sub are likely to be spoken down to by a bunch of condescending nerds that feel superior to outsider idiots. I know that many of you are very kind and welcoming, but enough of the user base are elitist pricks about everything that new users will notice immediately.

Lemmy can't seem to decide if they want to grow or if they want to gate keep. I think the reality is that as more people are blanket banned from reddit without any reason such as myself that people will keep slowly trickling in.

The only "change" I think Lemmy needs is its user feedback. I have been banned from so many subs for completely unrelated things and without going and looking up the mod logs for my own name I wouldnt have any clue whatsoever. I would just think that Lemmy was broken constantly since it just gives you submitting errors instead of telling you that you have been banned or anything.

The "automod" messages are basically useless as they don't tell you what rule you broke, which comment it was specifically or who actually initiated the ban. I know they aren't always actually "automatic" bans because I have gotten messages from automod for comments I left weeks ago. So either they are the slowest and least attentive bots on planet earth or the mods of those subs are using the automod to hide behind as a layer of anonymity.

I do my part! (Throw a couple of PRS the devs way then go back to my goblin hole)

Thank you for your work :) I'm not sure I'll have time for this, but I'll try to check what I can improve on the UI. Where can I find the sources for the "alternative UI"?

• https://a.lemmy.world/ - Alexandrite UI
• https://photon.lemmy.world/ - Photon UI
• https://m.lemmy.world/ - Voyager mobile UI
• https://old.lemmy.world/ - A familiar UI

I dont know. Not sure what can be improved, because that site keeps sending the majority of users to the large instances. Its against everything the fediverse was supposed to be. Decentralized. Not 5 instances having all users.

But whatever. Im happy on my smaller instance. :)

Is there an easy way to add tags (language and interests) to servers? I excepted one instance to come up with a certain combination, but there were none at all

There'd probably arise a need of a default instance with only guest access for a test drive before they pick their own instance, with some pop ups pointing at the fact that the name nutomic@lemmy.ml means he is a part of some meta-subreddit lemmy.ml, that doesn't mean shit for he just helped andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works with a link to the source. Their likes are collected but never shown. When they'd want to stop lurking and finally press a login button, it shall instead invite them to see instances of people they liked before first, others next, with tips what lead some rank so high in their list. After the signup is confirmed, their likes may or may not be transported, but their temporal profile is deleted.

I see the natural flow would be something akin to that: we start with a showcase of general content from different nearly-default instances and then get them recs about persons they did enjoy reading.

Thank you for this post and encouragement. I am open to volunteering my time and talents to help people find Lemmy.

However, after the work is done, it would be fantastic if you all could invest in advertising. I know that Google and Bing aren't great but if I had to guess, search trend for "reddit alternatives" is probably rising and Lemmy is in a great spot to provide reddit refuges a life raft.