this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Yes, by quite a margin as well, I believe. It's unfortunate, and the only solution is to make diverse instances and advertise them well :) The fediverse is better if the load is more evenly distributed across instances instead of having most users sit on a couple of instances.
It will happen over time. Lemmy and Beehaw are still infinitesimally small compared to reddit. Trying to push people onto other servers right now is extreme premature optimization.
The issue is that the "first move" advantage is quite real and the momentum gained by lemmy.ml and beehaw.org can easily dwarf diversity on the network. Of course you don't have to aggressively spread people out, but maybe the spotlight should be fairer, so to speak.
Can you explain what the issue is? I think it's all but inevitable that one server will become the "default" server that most people will create an account on first. As they learn more about how everything works, they may choose to create another account on a server with different rules that suite them better. That flow seems much easier to me than putting pressure on new users to pick the "right" server from them off the bat.
It happened with mastodon.social, and it'll probably happen here too.
I agree, there's no need to pressure users. But there's also a lot of room for improvement and for a better onboarding flow. We shouldn't just settle with the current page and on the idea that people will later migrate their account. Some other commenter was talking about a sort of wizard, to filter instances based on interests and other factors, while anlther mentioned rotating registrations, and I think those are great ideas! They would make the process easier and more intuitive, also allowing the users to be more evenly distributed across the network, in a more "invisible" way to the user. Would help the user and the network alike.