this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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I think the barrier to entry also helps a bit. The folks willing to put up with the rough edges that Lemmy has are also likely willing to participate with the intent of making Lemmy a success rather than just "hangers on" as it were. With a 1600% growth in "active" user population, there are definitely a ton of lurkers, yet. Once it becomes more approachable, we'll see if the community feeling that Lemmy has begins to tarnish and fade as the volume of interaction and content rises.
I was thinking the same, especially after seeing several posts "demanding" Lemmy to change this and change that.
I mean, that's not to say there's no room for improvements, but if the first thing some people do when going to a new platform is wanting changes to meet their personal way of doing things, instead to try and adapt first to how the platform works and learn from it, in my opinion it means those people are not really interested in being here and make lemmy succeed, they're just following the "flavor of the month" and won't last long here anyway.
I think the fediverse being not so intuitive might be a very good thing actually, it can act as a sort of filter so it doesn't succumb to the masses ruining everything, hopefully.
Sometimes I worry I might be being too snobby by thinking it's a good thing there's a small barrier to entry here, but the quality of the discourse is SO much better than Reddit it's hard to argue with the results.
I have been thinking this over the past week on reddit every time I see a "Lemmy/Kbin needs to sort out X, Y and Z otherwise it's going to fail massively." or "Lemmy/Kbin is impossibly hard to use/sign up for". Usually with CAPITAL LETTERS and emojis.
Like... ok. I don't think you'll be missed with that attitude. At least for the time being.
I read Haiku (OS) has no future recently and I think a similar thing is happening here.
Do we want to "have a future" or do we just want to be a cool place doing cool shit for ourselves?
Yeah "having a future" is always under the lens of "marketable/corporate profits" anyway. Some people don't understand that sometimes, humans just want to build nice things because they want to!
To be fair, I had some of those complaints with the instances initially being linked. It clicked when RIF linked to Lemmy.World in its final update message. It didn't have dumbass hoops to go through, just a straight forward email, username, password, you're in system like the first few things I was seeing. That and many people were over explaining it and just confusing the hell out of people.
If a person if truly interested in moving to a place with better discourse, they'll make the effort. If not, they should stay on Reddit.
Totally agree, it's amazing how many people can be discouraged by a small bump over the road. Kinda like how free mobile games have millions of downloads but games that are like, a dollar, are lucky if hit a thousand (and the gap in quality is astounding most of the time).
The barrier isnt that high in my opinion at least. Its just signing up to any instance in lemmy and thats it. I choose shitjustworks cuz they seemed level headed and i heard some nasty rumors about some of the other bigger lemmy instances so that was another factor on it i guess.
I'll admit I like having a pretty interface to interact with so I hesitated to make my account until I found Connect for Lemmy. Looks nice and easy to get used to