this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.


Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

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we have a nice thing going here, and i'm glad that about 5,500 of you are here to share it with us. it's a new day tomorrow and i hope you'll be here for that too

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[–] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

There are a lot of applications we want to deny because they do not include enough information for us to assess if they are a good fit for our community but cannot until the bug is fixed, otherwise they will never know that we denied them and they won't be able to submit a new application,

[–] fhqwhgads@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I think this is ultimately going to limit the success of Lemmy. With Reddit self-destructing right now and Lemmy being proposed as an alternative, there is a short window of time for Lemmy to become incredibly popular, but the sign up process has to be be as frictionless as possible. However, it's anything but that on instances like Beehaw:

  1. Having to write an application is a hoop that many people won't want to bother jumping through.
  2. Requiring users to wait for their new account to be approved is going to put many off. I suspect a lot just won't come back to check if their account has been approved.
  3. Being rejected (especially without realizing) is going to leave a sour taste in people's mouths and they'll just not bother.
  4. Requiring a human to manually read applications and approve every new sign-up is obviously self-limiting.

Sure, there are instances that don't require manual approval, but many people aren't going to spend much time hunting for one. Most people are just going to pick one of the most popular ones and give up as soon as they meet any kind of resistance.

[–] daniel@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't disagree with your comment, but I think many long-time reddit users will say that reddit was better long before it grew to 400+ million users. A lot has been written about how online communities, when they reach a certain size, become worse. Easily-digestible (and often subpar) content get upvoted by a broader mass of subreddit users while previously appreciated and easily-found discussions get drowned out.

I think the point I'm trying to make is that Lemmy or any other reddit alternative would be better off if they didn't aim for 400+ million users. So measuring success beyond measuring the DAU. And I don't think they are. But yes, to even reach 1 million users, the signup process should be straight forward and fast, and the overall user experience smooth. I guess a slow signup process helps with scaling to ensure the latter.

When the floodgates open during the subreddit blackout, the reddit alternative that you can easily sign up for and that can handle the load might "win." Hopefully there will be more than one, because the centralized nature of reddit is obviously why we're having this problem in the first place.

[–] fhqwhgads@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Right but there's a huge chasm between "Enough users to make a service a viable alternative to Reddit" and "400+ million users".

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