tbf people just wanna sign up and click on funny links, not browse through 100 rando instances to find the one that lines up with their exact interests and wait for approval and worry about uptime and whether their instance will still exist in a year
I feel that, while lemmy is still a work in progress, it is already pretty adequate for solving this need. If you want to subscribe to other instances you can do it from within your insance by going up to communities and searching. You can also click the all tab and see a bunch of instances from around lemmy that your instance is federated with.
I think mastadon struggled with this because the twitter model is to follow people and depending how far removed the servers are this can be trickier. Compared to lemmy where people interested in a single subject will likely target and find the subject theyre interested in and bring themselves together naturally.
Furthermore I think some people are splitting up and dividing into sub instances and tiny subjects a little prematurely. Reddit didnt get super esoteric with it's subs until it got big and the larger subs either declined or got too noisy to talk about certain things. Like for example how beehaw has an operatingsystems instance instead of a linux, ubuntu, macos, windows, fedora, archinux, opensuse, openbsd, etc. Right now there arent enough of us that we dont need to subdivide.
I've seen people literally signing up here just to make like 50 empty communities and not post or comment on anything at all. Definitely a lot of folks just trying to stake some territory that they think will be valuable in the future.
Let me see if I underatand this correctly:
If I create an account on a random, small instance. And then go to the "all communities" feed. I can automatically see all communities that are in my instance. In addition to that, I can see all communities of other Lemmy instances, that are "federated". But I cannot see other communities from other nstances, unless I go on there, find the communitis and manually subscribe to them (I believe there are other ways to get them to show up, like using the search etc.?)
So, as a normal user. Who's just looking for a replacement for /r/all, wouldn't joining the largest lemmy instance that is fedarated to many others (Just by how many users it has, because it's the users who link instances by their actions?) make perfect sense?
I use lemmy.world. they have an associated mastodon as well.
Same here, except I have no interest in Mastodon.
I definitely didnt pick sh.itjust.works for the funny name, naaaaaaaaah
New feddit.de user reporting in
Ze Germans seem to have their own monopolistic instance
Well, it is following the general idea behind Fediverse. Related communities are preferred to own the servers.
Disclaimer: I created my account on feddit.de as well
The documentation explaining how fediverse works is so bad. It's so long and convoluted anyone new just can't be bothered reading it.
Yeah. It needs to be explained much better. Compare it to email or something
Docu-what now?
Seriously, if the average user needs to understand distributed systems to play in the fediverse pool, they are going to land back at Reddit. Just get people in the door (any door) and fight the technical debt that creates later.
Sure, it's a shit plan. But, it's the only way to really capitalise on the current moment. With both Twitter and Reddit blasting away at their own feet, there is a real opportunity for something better to step up. The fediverse can be that thing. But, not if people end up gatekeeping it. Less Stallman style, "RTFM!" And more, "hey, welcome. Let's get you set up."
Idk what's going on, I just know I'm ready for open source options. I'm signed up here and mastodon now and plan to use the duration of the reddit strike to learn more about these platforms, delete my activity on others, and slowly build communities so I'm not reliant on others for news and learning.
I don't think it's too difficult to figure out. Seems more like a matter of shifting activity to keep people engaged. I'm far from tech literate, though.
First I created account there and then landed on my current instance, because lemmy.ml's admin views looks sketchy for me. Been living in ex-ussr for all my life I just cant accept all that communists and marxists and the fact that lemmy.ml has /c/Communism on it.
I know that's silly but that's why I'm not there anymore.
I chose lemmy.ml based on two things:
Still something that could help with the choosing-an-instance process is to display in the list of servers the community rules and if they are blocking certain communities.
As someone who intentionally joined a different instance, the biggest issue is the “federation” doesn’t allow cross-authentication. Clicking a link to another instance moves me to that instance where I’m not logged in. Authentication should really be cross-instance.
Ich war dabei.
listen, I'm willing to go to smaller instances if necessary, but for the same reason I signed up for mastodon.social - I want my local community to not be a desert, if at all possible.
It looks on the main page, you can view posts across all communities on lemmy, regardless of which community you're on, so that certainly helps.
Problem is that a) new users don’t know that they can join communities across servers, and b) it is intuitive use start with the servers that a lot of people like.
Instance browsing and onboarding is probably the biggest challenge to Lemmy’s growth. The current experience either scares new people away, or encourages them to congregate on a limited set of instances.
Lemmy.fmhy.ml was the easiest one to join I found and suites my interests nicely
I'm in lemmy.world. they have an associated mastodon as well.
Well, hello from feddit.de! Since I'm a german user I thought it'd be only logical to register on a german instance. While new registrations are semi-locked, the criteria for being let in are quite easy to pass and they are mostly in place to filter out spam. Got my account approved right on the next day
I think people naturally tend toward the servers of the people that started the project and also the servers that have the most people on them. As the federated technology continues to smooth out I think more people might be more comfortable spreading out to other servers.
Personally I started out on the Beehaw server but they had some rules I didn't like so then I found another server.
I couldn't deal with the no downvote button in beehaw server. Lemmy.ml seemed to be fit my preference best when I joined at the time. There's also the fact that there's no way to migrate your history right now so I'm staying where I am atm I guess. It also feels like the main instance is the less likely to go down in the future
