Part of the problem is that when a new user starts exploring Lemmy, they see the list of “most popular instances” and are inclined to gravitate towards them, when it’s really not necessary to join them to interact with them… As a recent Reddit refugee, that was what I struggled with the most.
Honestly I joined lemmy.ml because it had the description that most closely matched my interests without feeling like I’m joining one single person’s home lab experiment. I think we would need a few more large general purpose (vanilla) instances.
On the other hand I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to condense communities/topics into single, topic-specialized servers. I can’t imagine, from a UI perspective subscribing to 100 different news communities and another 100 gaming communities and… I feel like the current UI just isn’t designed with this in mind.
That’d be great. Or even show a list of communities, rather than instances, and let the user find some communities that interest them first, then gravitate towards an instance from there (though that might not solve the problem if the most popular communities are from the most popular instances.)
Could even promote smaller instances that are federated with the popular instances, instead of promoting the popular instances directly.
Making the understanding of lemmy’s internal infrastructure incumbent upon users seems a bit … clunky. I work in IT, I get why it works this way, but I don’t see how making it so apparent it serves any benefit to users.
If any user can participate in any community regardless of instance, does anything matter other than instance capacity? The sign up could just automatically select an instance on that basis (but also provide the user the option to select one manually).
I think the main thing about instance being important is the instance moderation and federation choices. Some people will of course want as hands off as possible, but some instances are certainly not that (one is very explicitly communist for instance IIRC). So ideally you’d pick an instance that fits your moderation goals, followed by one that you have some other affinity for - like the gaming idea. I joined sopuli because of it being Finnish and I have that heritage, even as an American. I also like not having everything hosted in the US so…
I could also easily see some people having multiple identities tied to instance interests. I suggested it would be nice if /r/sysadmin here at /c/sysadmin was not a community on lemmy.ml but actually its own instance, perhaps trying to pull in /r/networking, /r/sysadminjobs, /r/linuxadmin etc. Not only is that more likely to be work related, so you want a “work” identity, but it seems like you’d have the benefit of a group of communities filling the frontpage of the instance with stuff you’re likely interested in.
I see this a bit with mastadon with a journo.host vs an infosec.exchange vs my generic vivaldi.social account.
I fear that we wont be so lucky. If a million people try to check out Lemmy at once, all the instances can go down.
Mine will be fine. I splashed out and got a VPS with one whole CPU core!
Part of the problem is that when a new user starts exploring Lemmy, they see the list of “most popular instances” and are inclined to gravitate towards them, when it’s really not necessary to join them to interact with them… As a recent Reddit refugee, that was what I struggled with the most.
Contributions welcome: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site
Honestly I joined lemmy.ml because it had the description that most closely matched my interests without feeling like I’m joining one single person’s home lab experiment. I think we would need a few more large general purpose (vanilla) instances.
On the other hand I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to condense communities/topics into single, topic-specialized servers. I can’t imagine, from a UI perspective subscribing to 100 different news communities and another 100 gaming communities and… I feel like the current UI just isn’t designed with this in mind.
Perhaps instances should be promoted according to current and predicted capacity.
That’d be great. Or even show a list of communities, rather than instances, and let the user find some communities that interest them first, then gravitate towards an instance from there (though that might not solve the problem if the most popular communities are from the most popular instances.)
Could even promote smaller instances that are federated with the popular instances, instead of promoting the popular instances directly.
Making the understanding of lemmy’s internal infrastructure incumbent upon users seems a bit … clunky. I work in IT, I get why it works this way, but I don’t see how making it so apparent it serves any benefit to users.
If any user can participate in any community regardless of instance, does anything matter other than instance capacity? The sign up could just automatically select an instance on that basis (but also provide the user the option to select one manually).
I think the main thing about instance being important is the instance moderation and federation choices. Some people will of course want as hands off as possible, but some instances are certainly not that (one is very explicitly communist for instance IIRC). So ideally you’d pick an instance that fits your moderation goals, followed by one that you have some other affinity for - like the gaming idea. I joined sopuli because of it being Finnish and I have that heritage, even as an American. I also like not having everything hosted in the US so…
I could also easily see some people having multiple identities tied to instance interests. I suggested it would be nice if /r/sysadmin here at /c/sysadmin was not a community on lemmy.ml but actually its own instance, perhaps trying to pull in /r/networking, /r/sysadminjobs, /r/linuxadmin etc. Not only is that more likely to be work related, so you want a “work” identity, but it seems like you’d have the benefit of a group of communities filling the frontpage of the instance with stuff you’re likely interested in.
I see this a bit with mastadon with a journo.host vs an infosec.exchange vs my generic vivaldi.social account.
I started a networking community on my local… let’s gooooooooo!