workgooddo you think lemmy will ever have millions of users and niche topics or subs like reddit?
No, not unless the “choose an instance” problem at sign-up is resolved.
Well that would lump all user into one instance. Costs of that instance would be huge, leaving the owner to seek out ways of monetizing the whole thing. Downtime and disruptions would then also impact a large part of the user base. And if the instance goes belly up, those users are shit out of luck. It would also place a lot of power in the hands of that instance.
Basically what you describe are the exact things the fediverse is meant to fix. Otherwise you are just creating a new single large social media, with all the same issues. The whole point is to have people be distributed over lots of instances or even run their own instance.
The point however is valid, this is an issue that deserves some thought. But it’s a hard problem to solve.
This is true for more aspects of Lemmy in my opinion. For lots of things it’s too similar to other larger social media, where I feel better choices exist. Or it’s similar to one kind of social media, where it could use aspects of other kinds of social media. We are seeing some of that being fixed now with Lemmy being able to integrate with other parts of the threadiverse.
hoshikarakitaridiaThen choose one at random. Or make a register page that lets you search for one using tags.
I genuinely don’t think this is hard, it just takes someone putting the time in.
Have a “sorting hat” that will assign people to an instance based on their interests could be good.
Not even interests per se, but rather qualities of the instances like:
- do you want nsfw blocked?
- do you want downvotes enabled?
- do you want more or less defederation from potentially objectionable instances?
- etc
Basically all the features that invalidate the “just pick an instance, bro, it doesn’t really matter” argument.
NutomicThere are multiple defaults on join-lemmy.org
Its already solved, you get an automatic instance suggestion here: join-lemmy.org
A roulette wheel of random instances is certainly a solution, but it’s not a great one, given that there are substantial differences between instances that could potentially impact a user’s fediverse experience, such as who they’re defederated from, whether they allow nsfw or downvotes, etc…
Thing is that we dont have any information about someone who visits joinlemmy, other than the IP address which gives the location, and Accept-Language HTTP headers. So it attempts to give useful suggestions with that limited info.