There have been various posts here in the last days describing how difficult it is for new people to start using Lemmy. In fact they are absolutely correct, it is much easier to get started on Reddit. But what many forget is that Lemmy is not a corporation employing dozens of full-time designers, running A/B-tests and so on. Lemmy is an open source project run by volunteers, with only @dessalines and me working on it full-time. Neither of us is a particularly good designer, and our time is mainly spent working on the backend (database, federation, api), and preparing the upcoming 1.0 release.
If you see anything on join-lemmy.org or in the Lemmy UI itself that could be improved, the best option is to make that improvement yourself. Both of them use standard web technologies (nodejs, tailwindcss, inferno etc). The userbase here is quite technical so there are many of you able to contribute. We rarely reject any pull requests as long as they make a real improvement. Though it usually requires a little back and forth to review the changes and then address the review comments.
You can find the source code for join-lemmy.org here and follow development instructions in the readme. Regarding the default Lemmy UI go here and read the documentation with development instructions. If you are not a developer you can still help, for example by improving the documentation. Additionally you can make changes to the texts for joinlemmy and lemmy-ui.
All this said, there have also been some suggestions to make onboarding easier by directing new users to a hardcoded default instance. This may sound like a good idea at first but won’t work well in practice. Running such an instance would take significant time for administration and moderation, but we maintainers are already too busy. Besides it would be impossible to reach an agreement who this default instance should federate with or how exactly it should be moderated. So if you want to get nontechnical users to Lemmy, the solution is to link them directly to a specific instance based on their interests.
My proposal have been a little more complicated, but IMO works well for a BFU:
I’m willing to work on this if we can sit down and agree on the criteria for the pool. I can also ask my UX guy to help a little.
Feel free to text me here or on Matrix if this is something you think is worth pursuing. I’d also appreciate if you let me know it’s not the direction you want to go in.
I would call them “starter” instances. And I’m in agreement there should be a set of principles that these instances should follow but at the same time telling new users that it’s okay to switch instances. I started in .world but moved due to their increasingly conservative changes.
While I personally would steer new users away from .world, I think it’s more important to tell them it’s okay to switch instances.
The Mastodon Server Covenant is pretty much what you describe here, and could be used as a starting point: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
Hexbear meets those requirements, which rule would you add to exclude them? Back in the day, exploding heads would fit them too
maybe they should need to maintain a certain percentage of high pop instances that federate with them. Basically establishing a standard of trust.
“At least 80% of instances with over 1,000 active users must federate with you to be a Lemmy starter instance.”
This guarantees that new users will see the majority of content, and the starter instances won’t be embroiled in federation wars. The % value and pop numbers can change to reduce it down to a manageable number of starter instances.
Interesting idea
That was just rules to make it work on the technical side - you’re not helping the user experience if you have to wait half a day until someone manually approves your registration.
The rest would need to be discussed and actually thought out (and agreed upon with Lemmy devs, who own the join-lemmy domain).
I haven’t given it much thought because I see no point if it never gets implemented.
Cooking up global fediverse rules specifically meant to try and exclude an instance is crossing the line imo. If you don’t like interacting with them, join one of the many instances that have already blocked them.
This kind of crusade goes against the spirit of the fediverse imo.
Have a look at that frontpage and tell me if you think an average potential new joiner is going to stick around: https://lemmygrad.ml/
As long as it’s clearly labeled as something like “a communist instance”, why not? Some potential Lemmy users would probably feel right at home there. It doesn’t even have to be a controversial label, just a factual description that the Lemmygrad people would agree with.
In that case I agree. The issue I see is people saying “just give new joiners a random instance across the top 20”, denying the unique culture of a few of them
Ah, yes, that makes sense now! If it is an automatic, random server selection, then I also agree that it should be only generic, non-controversial instances that are selected.
These aren’t global fediverse rules, they’re constraints meant to apply specifically to the new user experience on Lemmy only.
I like this!
Here’s my idea for rules as well as the ones u came up with: No illegal shit No extremist ideology No hexbear or ml cos they will claim they are being unfairly censored and the irony of that is pretty funny.