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When the API changes came in on Reddit it appeared to cause quite a few people to shift to Lemmy, but not that many. I've said this before in other posts but the onboarding experience for Lemmy is awful for your average joe. From what I've read it was the same situation for Mastodon and that is why Bluesky took off instead.
There needs to be a clear concise point of entry for new users to the Fediverse that empowers users to quickly customise what they want to see. Most people don't care about how the Fediverse works and its benefits, they just want to consume content.
If I were technically capable and had the drive to do so I'd create a single onboarding site that would ask the user a few preference defining questions, chuck them on an instance that is relevant and apply some filters so they don't get spammed with anime posts if that isn't their thing. Oh and maybe show a couple of mobile apps.
Reddit is a website. Twitter is a website. Bluesky is a wrbsite.
Lemmy and Mastodon are not websites. They are webserver platforms. They're like WordPress or Joomla. Imagine trying to treat "WordPress" like a singular place on the Internet.
People keep trying to sell technology to people who are looking for a location, and it's fucking imfuriating.
Yeah imagine being wp engine lol
Yeah but Lemmy instances are interconnected to a certain degree. Wordpress instances are not. Key difference...
And? This is treated as the only selling point of the technology, and is a significant part of the confusion. Lemmy isn't a place you can go to on the Internet. Having to go into a 10 minute long explanation of ActivityPub doesn't help sell the social web. Not that people using it would be able to; most fediverse users still don't seem to know even the basics of how it works. People still ask about logging into different instances with the same credentials.
Some of them are. Not that that's the point.
Lemmy is something you use to create a social content aggregation website. It also happens to network with other, similar websites. But we want to treat them as access points some imagined whole, which A) they are not, and B) raises this problem of choice paralysis around which server to use, because they're discussed and treated as dumb terminals, rather than websites.
You definitely know what you're talking about. I have no idea how federated shit works. As far as I can understand each instance hosts its own content, but connects to other instances and fetches their content too. So, yeah, they're all different sites, but they're adhering to one "federation standard" (like an API response format for a post or a list of posts or whatever). How far off am I?
Yea I tried to create an account on another instance when I started, and never heard back. Then I went to Lemm.ee and it was quick and easy.
That said I kinda like how each one is run a bit different. It's nice to not have a top down structure but more of a terrorist cells situation.
Can't state it better than what you have said. Keep it simple! Lemmy has a better chance of been the new silkroad than Reddit. The appeal of Reddit is that it is the general populace equivalence of an ever updating Library of Congress. What will stop Lemmy from becoming that is the lack thereof for ease of onboarding.
I wouldn't be surprised more silly moderation tools by reddit admin in the name of reducing spam wil drive users out, Lemmy fediverse should use the tech knowledge they have to set up such funnel.Else, competitors will swoop in to take it's place.
I largely agree - the fediverse needs less friction if it wants widespread adoption. That's part of the reason why I wound up on .world. It was easy. I suspect I'm not alone here.
The other bit challenge is that each instance can have identically named communities, which drives fragmentation and makes each community seem less active. I dabble in photography, so I'll use some examples from that.
Reddit has this problem too, but there can only be one /r/photography. There are derivative communities like /r/streetphotography and /r/askphotography, but the original sub is unlikely to move/change.
By design the fediverse can have many /c/photography communities. In the case of photography there are three or four "big" ones and a bunch of smaller ones. There are also all the derivative communities, some of which are doing better than the 'root' community. One example of this is !superbowl@lemmy.world.
I'm not sure what a good solution is, especially when you start talking about "the same" community on multi-inatance. One of the design goals of the fediverse was to enable that should some instance go off the rails.