Reddit is starting to suck more and more everyday so here I am. A couple of questions -

  1. I created my account at lemmy.ca, but most people I have seen have lemmy.world accounts. Am I missing out on anything by not having a lemmy.world account?

  2. Reddit has an offical subreddit for Reddit news. Does Lemmy have any offical communities?

  3. On Reddit, you can’t post on some subreddits if you do not have enough karma or if your account is not old enough. Are there any rules like that on Lemmy?

Thank you!

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    On the flipside, that also scares people away. New users want to take part and immediately hit a barrier. The place where everyone mingles is closed off. They have to learn why that is and how the Fediverse is supposed to work, find some instance overview list and make a choice. Be angry for a short while until they understand the concept and realize it’s for the better… I think that’d be detrimental to the cause. I rather live with the issues that come with big instances than with a complicated onboarding process. But I think people already complained about onboarding on the Fediverse in general. I think we need to solve that issue first and then we can go ahead and also add some mechanism to steer people towards a more even distribution. But I don’t see anyone working on any of that for Lemmy. Until then, I’d say don’t do it.

    (And btw: I don’t want to see lemmy.world shrink, which wold be the outcome. What I’d like to see is other nice instances come into existence and grow to a similar size. Because they’re a nice place and people can identify themselves with the community there. It’d foster good behaviour if things happened because of some good reasons. Not just you grow because you’re already the biggest. That doesn’t foster anything. It’s just like playing Osmos.)

    • asudox@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      Naturally. This is the fediverse, if newbies don’t want to understand how it works even a little bit, they shouldn’t be here.

      And lemmy.world won’t shrink. I said “for the time being”, not forever. If LW keeps growing rapidly without giving other instances a chance, then it won’t be any different than Reddit.

      • asudox@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        There’s also no fix for the “onboarding problem”. That “problem” is federation itself.

        • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
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          3 months ago

          Well, there are some proposals to change this. I’d say it’s fixable by technology to some degree. For example instead of a sign up page that directly signs someone up with the specific instance, we could have a more general Fediverse signup page. Maybe ask the new user a few questions what they envision their instance to be. If they’re more aligned with this set of rules or the other. If they want “free speech” or a place with more moderation and less argumentative people. And then make some suggestions.

          Or instead of just signing them up with whatever instance they visited first, display a list of the current instance and 5 other random ones, shuffle them and make them deliberately click on one of them.

          That’d all help. Of course it can’t be solved 100%. But we could at least make an effort to do something about it.

            • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
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              3 months ago

              Yeah. My proposal is to replace the “Sign up” entry on every single instance with a page like that. And move the actual sign up one level further down, so everyone needs to click through that process.

              • asudox@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                Why? That’s really ineffective and just looks bad imo. That’s just a solution to people linking instances to join instead of leading people to join-lemmy.org.

                • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
                  0·
                  3 months ago

                  Because what the user wants is to sign up on Lemmy. We have to meet them at exactly that point. When they click on “Sign up”. And then our motive comes at play. We want to say to them »Hey stop, In case you don’t know, the Fediverse works differently than other social media platforms you might be used to. You have to make a decision here.« And I think it’s super effective to do it at that point. Doing it later is too late, because then they’re already signed up on a random place without being informed. And doing it earlier is inconvenient. They might not be motivated to find out yet. Or it’s a hassle to gather that info yourself without even knowing it’s a thing.

                  And why is the way the Fediverse works looking bad? If it seems that way to you, you’re might be wrong here. So even more reason to prominently display these kinds of things.

                  And it doesn’t have to be complicated. As with software design in general, don’t overwhelm the user with options. Just offer a description on what’s happening and why. And give some sane default options. Don’t make it more than let’s say 5-10. And it’s just one click more in the process. It’s not too hard for the user to click once more if it’s for a good cause. And if done right, they could just randomly click on something if in doubt.

                  I’d just make it like in my earlier proposal. Add the page. Force the user to choose. Either they want to answer a few questions and get a tailored instance. Or sign up at the current instance. Or sign up at one of the 4 other instances we promote for a better distribution. And then continue to ask for a username and password.