This is not going to be a blogpost about "Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?". I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven't even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.

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[–] QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works 6 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

User Experience Friction - You can't just sign up, you need to pick a server. You've already lost a significant amount of people in that step.

I think this can be improved if there was a better way to explain the identity of each instance and why you might want to join other than just "generic Lemmy server for everyone to use"

Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they're not gonna have a good time.

I suggest a map that shows which instances are federated/defederated from eachother and lets you find which one has the closest identity to what you like. And possibly a disclaimer before joining one of the trifecta instances.

Or just say fuck it and join the one literally called "shit just works" like me 😂

[–] bampop@lemmy.world 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Ideally, I think instances ought to be something the casual user can be unaware of. Like the default experience should be instance-independent and the choice of instance should be some trivial thing that you can change on a whim carrying your entire user identity and chat history with you. I don't really get any functional sense of community from my instance anyway

[–] ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

Being able to migrate an account between instances would help a huge amount. I am almost wishing we could agree on a default instance for all newcomers, but this would work to just centralize the user base so it's not a good solution. However, if account migration were implemented, there could be a sort of "first steps" or "training ground" instance that accepts all new users by default and only allows accounts to remain there for a set period of time before asking them to find a new instance to call home. This would let users who aren't interested in the technical details of federation get their feet wet and figure out which instance aligns with them before needing to make the choice.

This scheme would definitely require that new users have the option of signing up to a particular instance right away; no need for the default instance to be the only sign up option.

[–] Sasquatch@lemmy.ml 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I thought ML was machine learning🥴

[–] dance_ninja@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago

Big same lol

[–] pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago

Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they're not gonna have a good time.

It's worse than that. Lemmy just as reddit is mostly American. American election results were kinda... interesting. And Lemmy is very-very-very polarised. So there's likely 33% chance that new American user will get to "politically their" instance, 33% chance they'll get to the instance on the other side of the spectrum, and 33% chance it doesn't matter what instance they'll end up at, they'll be terrified by both sides. So at best it's 33% chance for user to find their hivemind, realistically it's probably much less because even people technically from "your side" might find Lemmy to be way too radical. And that's just Americans, imagine how the rest 96% of the world react to Lemmy.