jerry

Haha wow. What an effective way to describe it.

Just saw this post with this link. This kind of info is super useful.

Long term, I agree -- the whole point of the fediverse is to distribute the user base, moderation capacity, etc. Initially though, we're just trying to make it as easy as possible to for folks to discover lemmy and use it.

Sending them on a wild goose chase to find an instance and sign up complicates that. Getting them to come back the next day is also way harder when that experience sucks.

If folks can sign up on your instance and use it as their gateway to the lemmy fediverse, its tremendously helpful for distributing load.

The challenge is, letting people know your instance exists, and when they finally do and you get 30 signups per hour, scaling your instance to keep up.

Long term, you also have to deal with all the sysadmin crap (scaling up/down based on load, security and updates, backups, assholes that DDOS your instance because they don't like your moderation decisions, copyright take downs, legal requests, etc).

Hard to say -- so far on lemmy.ml, when the backend is overload, I can get pages to load (presumably from cache) but actions I take to change things (sign in, post comments or content, etc) result in an eternal "spinny wheel".

thanks!

Yeah - its tricky. What I'm seeing though is instead of communicating that need at all, lemmy.ml and potentially other instance owners are just trying to push new users to smaller instances.

I am running my own mastodon instance in my basement - I've got other personal projects running in AWS, and work professionally in Azure. It sounds like you've got some great cloud experience as well. There seem to be lots of other similarly skilled folks here that can assist with deployment and scale automation (if that's what they need), or others that could assist by just signing up for $5/month on patreon to cover server costs. That call to action needs to happen though or else people wont do anything.

The context I'm using to predict the "big change" is the way the twitter/mastodon migration happened. Musk would do something, and literally within the same hour, thousands of new accounts would be created on mastodon and all those new users were flexing the various features in the platform to find accounts to follow and post content. With that history, I feel like "a drip" of users is unlikely - it'll be more like waves from multiple tsunamis.

If things play out the way I'm expecting they will, we really will need instance owners to stand up, ask for the help they need and coordinate those efforts. Otherwise, users like me will just post meandering comments like this one, wondering what we can do to help.

Thanks!

A pinned post like "Welcome to Lemmy!" on Lemmy.ml and other instances with that link would help I think. Also, I think it would be a more streamlined experience (and less disorienting) if the "Join" links on that page went directly to the instance's signup page instead of the local instance feed.

I agree -- the FOMO thing is real.

However having a clear path to follow would really help capture/retain those users. In other words "Wow, Lemmy is so popular it can't handle the traffic -- here's an up-to-date list of instances to try anyway", or some other option.

Possibly a pinned post where instance owners can comment info on their own instances without having to wait for someone to update a master list?

Mastodon during the twitter migration had a problem where folks were standing up instances, but new users were having trouble finding them, or overwhelmed with lots of "interest-based" instances. Most users don't care about a "furry" specific instance, or an instance focused on San Francisco Donut enthusiasts. They just want an instance.

Another problem is as time went on, some of those instances shut down abruptly and wiped out accounts for folks. Having a few centralized and supported instances at first will help solve that problem as well.

I have the technical know how, given a "GettingStarted.md" file to read to stand up an instance, but I'd rather put my time/energy into supporting an existing one. Dealing with the horde of people currently joining and about to join will require some coordination.