Fediverse

Instance selection at sign-up remains the primary barrier to entry.

I think there needs to be a quick question form upon sign-up, going over the biggest differences between instances. Such as: "do you want downvotes activated? Do you want to see NSFW? Do you want little, some, or heavy automated blocking of potentially objectionable material?" etc, then have the sign-up page provide you with up to three instance options based on your selected preferences.

Otherwise you're either forcing users to do this research on their own ("ew, homework just to sign up for social media? no thanks") or they're going in blind and selecting at random, very likely ending up on an instance with qualities/features they don't like.

A separate issue: during the big 2023 rexit (when I moved over), the primary instance that most new users joined, lemmy.world, was a buggy, buggy mess, practically unusable for the first few days. I don't know if that was specifically because of the influx of new users or if it just worsened problems that had skated by when there were only a handful of users before, but I imagine that turned away quite a few potential new Lemmings. Hopefully that won't be an issue this time around, but I guess that depends on how big the exodus is and how much Lemmy infra has strengthened in the 2.5 years since.

There's only a few communities I'd be interested in seeing come over and they've already made it clear they're not interested in moving because of reddits enshittification. I don't think lemmy should cater to people who can't be bothered to get over the small initial hump of choosing an instance. We don't need more users just for the sake of more users anyway. People like that aren't bringing anything to the table anyway.

I really hope the patience for trying to learn what the fediverse instances are and how to actually get an account dissuades a lot of the reactionaries and impending tiktok brainrot lol

There's one major oversight here that needs to be addressed if Lemmy/Piefed were to suddenly gain a glut of new users. How bans work.

Currently, instance bans and community bans are treated as two separate things. When a user is banned from an instance, you'll often see in the logs a bunch of community bans alongside it at once. These are communities that user has posted on. An instance ban automatically applies hard-bans to communities they have interacted in from that instance. But the problem here is its only communities they've interacted in.

The instance ban itself is simply a rejection of federation. It doesn't block users from posting in communities on that instance - only the community bans do that. It just means their posts won't federate out. This means that an instance banned user can continue to be a nuisance in most communities (or all, if they are pre-emptively banned) on an instance locally - and the moderators of that community and instance won't even know. With larger numbers of users would also mean larger amounts of trolls and incompatible users, which could greatly increase the chance of people simply vandalising communities and no-one even noticing.

From a technical standpoint: No.

I'm on probably my dozenth account now. The majority of my jumps are because the instance I'd chosen became unstable, had long and/or frequent outages, or just died and went away completely with no warning.

Even the biggest instance I've ever joined, lemmy.world, choked whenever there's a large exodus from Reddit or a lemmy upgrade or a bug farts in Belgrade.

The instances with fairly open enrollment will likely break under the load. The smaller instances with ridiculous sign-up requirements and/or a need for manual approval of accounts will discourage people from using Lemmy at all.

And because of those technical issues...

New instances will pop-up quickly from determined Redditors, because the stuff that's already around can't keep up. Then those new instances will become the heavy hitters. The ones we have now will be vulnerable to atrophy and becoming insular. The overall Fediverse will be vulnerable to the silo effect, diluting its value to folks, as it will basically be RedFed versus OldFed.

From an end-user standpoint: Also no.

The "culture" would shift practically overnight. I've already seen that happen. When I first got here, people were actually kind to each other. Users stood up for others and disparaged others for being hostile, aggressive, overly negative, etc. Then we had the API-calypse surge. Now those radically kind days are long gone. It happened fast. I tried to keep it up in my own small little corner, but even I don't do as good a job as I should.

While the Fediverse may be "strong" overall, the individual pieces are too fragile to handle a significant Rexit onslaught. If even a small fraction of all Reddit users came to the Fediverse en-masse, this place as we know it would be gone.

I've been SLOWLY getting into the Fediverse for a little over a year now. My biggest gripe has always been discovery and availability. I feel like there is a lot more effort required to find people/communities I am interested in. Then if/when I do find them they are often not very active.

So yeah I'll say what everyone else is saying that UX needs some work. I used Lemmy for a while last year and just couldn't get used to the interface, I'm not Feddit and like this interface more. But it could use some work on mobile imo.

with new reddit, the writing was on the wall. a wave of bans is what helped start lemmy long before the api debaucle. when that happened, there was finally enough content that this became a usable replacement.

we are definitely ready for more content

Is reddit blocking VPNs now? I don't use reddit anymore, but sometimes I search something on the web and like it or not, redditors in niche communities have good answers to uncommon questions. Definitely better than can be found on quora or other places.

But it doesn't let me view them, supposedly because I'm using a VPN now...

If that's the case, fuck spez and all corporate sellouts. Reddit used to be a mecca for freedom of association...

Maybe pushing Piefed instead of lemmy would be the way to go. Piefed has a more beginner friendly UI and makes it easier to find new communities

Algo's for discoverability are needed Quiblr does it nicely but im not sure if the project is still supported and there is no app

Sign up is still a confusing, exclusionary, inaccessible mess. So, no.

We need more cat forums.

Ready for a bunch of teens coming in and trashing the place? No.