Reddit is starting to suck more and more everyday so here I am. A couple of questions -
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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?
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Reddit has an offical subreddit for Reddit news. Does Lemmy have any offical communities?
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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!
Btw: It’s good you signed up with a smaller instance. Ideally we want the users to spread across instances. So for example lemmy.world doesn’t gain too much power (which it already has). So signing up on a different instance is a good thing for the Fediverse.
What’s the danger there? (Just curious)
Same as reddit, every instance can choose to just start monetizing if they wish and even stop being part of the fediverse. If they get too big and decide to do it then it’ll be a blow to the content on all the fediverse. That’s why it’s better to spread out a bit more to avoid one big instance controlling the whole.
Happy cake day
Aw, I thought we all agreed on beans day?
First of all we had big instances die. Like feddit.de and kbin.social That always damages a big part of the network. If things were distributed more evenly, it’d be a smaller chunk of the fediverse that vanishes in such a case.
Then, being way bigger than the others gives someone disproportionately bigger power. If you’re not having any issue with that, you might as well join Reddit. And the first big Lemmy instance (lemmy.ml) arguably explots(?) that. They’ll act against you once you say something negative about communism, China, … and that’s not okay to do. Now we have lemmy.world as the biggest instance and it’s way better. But still I’ve also read people complain about their moderation practices.
If we have some dominating entities, they’ll disproportionately shape the tone, atmosphere and behaviour on the whole network. We might or might not want that.
In the end I think what actually happens should reflect the vision and the capabilities of the software. The Fediverse is supposed to be an interconnected network of instances. If the technology works as intended (and the vision behind the Fediverse is correct) I expect that to manifest in the way it actually grows. If it favors one or two large instances, we either might have an issue with the technology/software and it’s not able to truly achieve it because of some shortcomings. Or the idea behind all of it might not be more a theoretical concept than viable in the real world.
If we want to look at it in the end-state, we have email as an example. That’s a super old federated standard and now also dominated by a few big players. It’s still possible to host your own email. But not really fun because of lots of complications that come with it.
[Edit: The dynamics could also be viewed as competition succeeding. If someone does their job well, they’ll naturally attract people?! And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’m not sure what to make of this. And I’m not sure if that’s the dynamics at play here in the first place.]
hey I really appreciate the insight and the explanation! you made me understand that concern and helped me learn :) thanks!
Thanks for the kind words 😊
If the LW admins decide to wrongfully ban someone, that person is banned from a lot of communities and from interacting with a lot of people. In a more equal network, each individual bad decision has a smaller effect on the whole
If LW admins really care about the fediverse, they probably should close their registrations for the time being, otherwise every newbie will start joining LW because it is the biggest instance out there.
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.)
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.
I don’t think I agree. The big difference in total users and monthly active users tells me lots of people abandon their accounts. As long as that policy is in place, it’ll naturally shrink because people leave and there aren’t any new users anymore to replace them. The only question is at what rate that’s going to happen.
And I also don’t agree with people who don’t understand the Fediverse shouldn’t be here… People should be here because it’s a nice place and they have a good time engaging here. The exact technology behind it shouldn’t matter too much. If at all.
I never said “people who don’t understand”, I said “people who don’t want to understand”. I am satisfied as long as a newbie knows what the fediverse is, why it is here and what instances are. They are the basics, aren’t they?
I’m also not sure about that. Do they really need to be bothered with that? Can’t they just expect a social media platform to do whatever? Without learning anything? I mean they might just want to use something and not be bothered. And arguably they’ll have more freedom here then they’d have for example on Reddit where this isn’t any issue. I’d say design the software to get out of their way, cater for them and have them here. I mean ultimately there is a limit. Sometimes you need to know how things actually work to get anywhere. But I still refuse to accept your point. I think that should be kept to a minimum. And users should be eased into it at the point it becomes necessary to know. That can be done by good software design.
The reason is simply because this is not the kind of social media people have been using for years. Just like how they “learned” how the centralized web works, they also should learn how the decentralized web works. I’m all for the fediverse to grow but I also don’t want ignorant people that don’t want to learn anything about the tech they’ll be using in here.
Quality over quantity or quantity over quality? Choose.
Yeah. I think in theory I disagree with you. But in practice I agree. I’ve seen people do exactly that. And almost everytime that behaviour comes from a place that also causes more issues. These people are better off with something else. I agree. And usually they’re annoying (to me) anyways so I don’t consider them a loss for the platform.
And I also regularly complain about the internet having become less than it used to be. Back then when it took some skill and effort to operate a computer and be on the internet, it was filled with intelligent people and people who were there for some reason. That meant they were motivated enough to go through all the hassle. You could engage with them in a different way than you nowadays do with the average user. Now everyone is here and lots of places and discussions feel different. It certainly affects things. So there is that.
It’s the same question if I ponder whether Linux should be used by more people. There are some other dynamics at play with that. But in the end, growing to a broader audience (on the desktop) is certainly going to change it. And I’m not sure if in a good way.
There’s also no fix for the “onboarding problem”. That “problem” is federation itself.
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.
That’s what join-lemmy.org does. It asks 2 questions:
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.
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.
I know if offers options to people, but the majority of people don’t want options, they want a single website
I guess a balanced approach would be to suggest Lemm.ee as a default option, and suggest the join Lemmy link for people curious about options
A default option is bad imo. We want a decentralized platform. Distribution will keep the fediverse alive and well. Maybe a dynamic “default” option would be one solution. One that just changes the default option to a different somewhat known instance once the current default option reaches a certain user count. For this to work, you’d need to lead people to join-lemmy.org.