nanashimy thoughts on lemmy so far
I just switched too, this is actually my first comment. Idk why everyone on reddit said lemme was too confusing
OOFshootEvery single time you offer an alternative to people, if it's not a perfect clone they complain that it's too confusing. What they're really saying is they didn't want to have to learn a single new thing at all.
kroldenI dont mind those people not joining.
DrQuintI do. Many times, it can be from a failure in UX or bad choice of on-boarding steps by the referrer. Those people aren't less valuable just because they didn't overcome a circumstantial hurdle.
Personally, I'm taking steps to lower that hurdle. I refuse to link anyone to the Join Lemmy page. That's a bad on-boarding practice, and we had Mastodon to prove it. I'm linking everyone directly to Lemmy.ml, which can be explored without committing, and telling them to consider explore the fediverse "later" if they like the way this vanilla instance works. Let's first show that the content and feature set is perfectly capable and there's nothing to dislike.
NutomicIts really better to link to joinlemmy so that people get distributed across different instances. We dont want everyone to be on the same instance, that would cause many problems.
Yes, but that's the thing, that's a culture, philosophy and safeguard concern. We want the ecosystem to be distributed because of many reasons we can go copy paste off of a fediverse explanation page or video.
But in these times, when people are looking for social media replacements, they do not share those concerns. Not initially at least. I see it like a hierarchy of needs but for social media consumption. We risk tiring people out at the understanding and culture step, and coming off to them as evangelists when all they're looking for in that moment is for ease of access to content and discussion. We can have our cake and eat it too by showing them that, yes, this platform can fit their needs, and also hint that it has these interoperability, customization, privacy and so on advantages that they can easily find about.
Look, I'm just saying, Mastodon has a bad rep. I met plenty of people who treat the whole Twitter migration thing as "those dumb evangelists with their stupid platform that doesn't even have a function tag search ahah". I'm not letting that happen again, at least not from my hand. I'm going to sell from the bottom of their pyramid .
This is better in an ideal world, but not practical right now. Let at lease one lemmy instance reach critical mass and become popular, then people will be more interested and learn about federation, and then people will start to branch out to other instances as they learn about what the differences are.
People need a smooth transition. That's the most important right now.
If you wanted to maintain distribution while also lowering onboarding friction, couldn't you round robin 301 redirects to the signup pages on the instances listed on the joinlemmy page or something? I guess with each instance being moderated differently, having different rules, and having a different culture/focus that might not fly, idk.
I think the very tiny barrier of entry to the fediverse helps keep it feeling mature. It's not flooded with teenagers who got their first phone like Reddit is