I mean have they seen how good Ice Cubes and Mlem look? How can they choose the default Twitter and Reddit apps over those masterpieces.
I mean have they seen how good Ice Cubes and Mlem look? How can they choose the default Twitter and Reddit apps over those masterpieces.
What do you think about this?
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
https://reddit.com/comments/1hzpnyo/comment/m6ttieg
Out of curiosity, how come you don’t recommend your own instance, feddit.org?
I think the main concern new users have are “Can I see everything across Lemmy, or will I be getting a fragmented experience?”. This was my initial concern and I’ve seen Redditors also voice this concern. People don’t know if being on an instance means you can only be isolated to that instance, which would mean missing out on wider content, or whether you see everything (at which point you might ask what is the point of the instances then?).
By presenting people with “here’s an instance if you’re American, here’s another if you’re European” might support the idea that people will get differenct experiences based on their location. They might ask: “Do Americans see different content to Europeans? What’s the difference? Maybe the American instance will have more users so I’ll pick that instead.”
In reality it doesn’t matter, you can sign up to an instance and subscribe to 0 communities on your own instance, but people don’t know this if they don’t know anything about it. I do wonder whether instances should be scored by a few factors and recommended that way?
It would be good if the join-lemmy site could randomly create you an account on one of the instances that qualify. Take that cognitive load away from the user and make that choice for them - and make it clear that they’re free to sign up to any instance they want.
This is 100% a huge concern for Mastodon. But for Lemmy isn’t that figure closer to like 1%?
People who don’t even know what things like “Beehaw” or “Hexbear” or “Lemmygrad” are, aren’t going to be put out so much that access to them is barred.
Lemmy.World has ~80% of all Lemmy users last I checked though I expect that will radically shift in the next couple of months (due to their policy change announcement yesterday). Like it or not, Lemmy is far more centralized than other Fediverse offerings like Mastodon, PeerTube, and I would presume Friendica.
Also, doesn’t Mastodon still lack an All feed? In contrast, the default sort option of https://discuss.online/ is to show All, so how is this really all that fragmented? The default sort option for lemmy.ml is Local, so without pressing any buttons the fragmentation effect is far greater there - they will see no posts to communities like !tenforward@lemmy.world or !AskUSA@discuss.online or anywhere else until they start poking around to see how the software works. But even there, unlike Mastodon (at least historically), pressing one button will instantly show the majority of the Fediverse content (well… minus everyone who got banned from that instance, which actually… is quite a lot).
Am I missing something though: what are users worried about in terms of fragmentation that applies to Lemmy? (That is actually true I mean, bc from what I can see, while it’s true for other Fediverse offerings, it’s not for Lemmy?)
15667/41874 = 37% of Lemmy monthly active users on LW: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/
256908/777047 = 33% of Mastodon monthly active users on Mastodon.social: https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon/
I think it’s that they don’t know ANYTHING about it, other than it’s a bunch of different servers that seem to operate independently. So they have no idea how the whole thing operates. I’ve been on Lemmy for about 18 months and I don’t know how the federation works for Mastodon or Friendica - I actually looked up Friendica the other day but just gave up after looking at the list of instances. I don’t know what it means to use a specific instance for Friendica, even though I know what it means for Lemmy. These people won’t know what it means at all.
Oh okay. Though you said “I do wonder whether instances should be scored by a few factors and recommended that way?”, and wanted to point out that Blaze has already done that work, which culminated in the list of those instances (discuss.online and sopuli.xyz). It’s just that there are only a few instances (~20) that are most highly worth mentioning to someone who refuses to engage in such technical details, and beyond Lemmy.World that compromises ~80% of all users on Lemmy, everything else combined is part of that remaining 20% anyway.
So this list of two instances to check out is a highly optimized, extremely streamlined statement crafted to help people avoid exactly what you are referring to in analysis paralysis. Though perhaps a statement could be added that Lemmy specifically, unlike other Fediverse offerings, does not need to worry as much about the fragmentation effect?
The really cool thing about that list is that you can simply click and immediately get to browsing the entire Threadiverse (minus Threads:-P). You don’t even need an account, and so to lurk this is all you need to know to get started. After that, if someone wanted to join an instance other than these, then yeah your list recommendation would help, but also keep in mind that it would need to be maintained as well as made in the first place, and then people made aware of where to go to view it, the latter of which imho is the chief problem since admins mostly refuse to update the sidebar text even to point to entire communities dedicated to discussing such matters, like e.g. !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca. But if you are interested in making such a list btw, I’m saying just in case, that is a great community to post it to for a start.
Edit: I’ve often thought about making such a post with such a list, but (a) Blaze has already done it in the past, (b) it would keep changing e.g. Lemmy.World’s huge announcement yesterday, and © I’m legit not certain what the point is really, bc most people (except those of us who discuss such matters inside of the Fediverse:-) don’t seem to care so much about such details. The chief barriers to people joining seem to be: (a) where content at (we simply don’t have the sheer amounts that especially Reddit does); and factors like “there be tankies there” or “I needz my free speech” (aka I’m a MAGAT and I would prefer Truth Social). In that regard, Lemmy.World’s announcement might actually help bring more centrists here, rather than them being turned away by interaction with a power mod, though I leave it to others to judge if that will be a good thing or not.
15667/41874 = 37% of Lemmy monthly active users on LW: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/
Even if feddit.org is bilingual, the main language is still German. The sidebar text is in German first, !main@feddit.org is name “Haupteingang” and is mostly in German, the Matrix chat is in German, etc. It makes sense, it’s the successor of feddit.de, but probably not ideal for a non-German speaker. My main account is on sopuli.
Indeed, I guess I’ll add a short “using a server on your continent is better for latency, content is the same”
I kind of did a similar assesssment a while ago (https://feddit.org/post/5215276/3396746)
Long story short, there is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)
That’s how I came up with sopuli.xyz (neutral name, stable, defederated grad and hexbear) and discuss.online (same)
Hey, I’m on sopuli!
So am I on my alt. Great instance.