I believe Dessa said during the AMA that he's working on it.
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Lemmy
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You're right. The devs know it can be confusing to new guys and are planning to do something about it. Idk what the progress is, though. They seem to be pretty busy making lemmy stable first.
It’s probably more important to fix stability issues before working on improving the onboarding experience. If people join and the experience is unstable, they may never come back. I think a lot of this reddit migration has been people that are used to being early adopters, that are more technologically-minded. We’re used to things being a bit more jank, and we’re happy to beta-test. Establishing a solid foundation now should be the first priority.
Completely agree
That would be helpful. As long as the admin of join-lemmy insists in promoting Exploding-heads and rammy-site, those instances have to be marked as racist and transphobic!
They should add filters for language and general purpose vs. specific topic; options to sort by size, age, connectedness, and reliability; write a short blurb about the administration policy of each instance (provided by the instance admins themselves); and add an "I'm feeling lucky" button that picks a proven reliable general purpose instance at random and just sends you to it. As well as big, bold text at the top saying "The instance you pick honestly isn't that important".
To your last point, imo that is the single biggest hurdle. Initial sign up inherently creates what I like to call menu anxiety. The extra steps and the time involved is contrary to all popular practices. You have to start customizing your experience before you even know what you're getting into, which is the inverse of how it is done everywhere else.
And then there's the potential to join an instance that is too small, where existing users haven't yet subbed to communities that may interest new users. They won't know they exist (without searching externally) based on the feed. Changing instances isn't currently intuitive or appealing to regular potential users.
I'm currently okay with how things are. However, mainstream adoption just can't happen until the devs achieve their goals. I'm a huge fan of their work already. We're a long way away from 1.0 but I do believe we'll get there.
I'm pretty sure I'm in a minority here, but I like that lemmy.world is so huge - and think it's both positive for the lemmyverse and an excellent starting point for new users.
It ties into the new user experience a lot: lemmy.world has a large userbase so most communities will already show up in its All. It's consistently had new registrations open where many others have closed during large sign-up rushes. It has a thoughtful admin team experienced with running services like this. It's likely to be around for the very long term and, short of some DDoS attacks, should be fairly reliable.
I know having instances this big is objectively bad if you're measuring things like how distributed or resilient to disruption the Lemmyverse is, but I think the positives outweigh the negatives on the whole.
If I'm honest, I think the best way to implement an "I know which instance I pick isn't that important, please just send me to a random one" feature would be to send the user to a random one of the top 5 largest instances. I stopped short of suggesting that because I know it would be deeply unpopular though - enough so that it becomes a bad idea on that merit alone.
Would need some kind of server setting to specify categorisation. Maybe open a GitHub issue for a server setting to do this, and then it could be displayed in the join-lemmy site