I just joined Lemmy and so far I’m enjoying it. It’s a little bit sparse in terms of content and users, but I think it has a really cool structure, and it feels more human than certain other social media sites.
I’m curious to know what users think about who is welcome here. Do you think it should be gates open, everyone including your aunt should join, or is it more exclusive to people interested in the fediverse as a starting point? Or something else?
Not trying to stir up shit, just genuinely curious about what the vibe is and where the community thinks it is or should be going.
It would be great if it could become a virtually universal social media eventually, but for its quirks to be understood by everyone, some critical mass of first adopters must understand the fediverse. So I think the fediverse will self-select for technically knowledgeable people at first before eventually becoming accessible to the public, not by any fault of its own but by virtue of having been around long enough and grown enough of a community to attract the average person from traditional social media.
I also think there are different instances and communities for people with different priorities. People interested in the ideas behind the fediverse can congregate on lemmy.ml (because that’s where Lemmy’s developers are, right?) and in FLOSS communities, etc., while people looking for a social network that won’t use them for profit can flock to region-specific instances, etc.
The community right now is mostly technical, with tons of posts on Linux or just the latest tech/science news. It’s not that people will be unwelcome here if they don’t know this stuff, but I think someone that isn’t technical like my aunt will have a harder time finding content relevant to them.
Then you have the insane number of political posts and extremists which I’m sure you’ve seen around. I blocked a fair number of people just so my feed isn’t filled with junk. Not a good first impression if someone joins Lemmy and they instantly see those posts/comments.
I’ve said it before but the threadiverse (lemmy,kbin,etc) isn’t mainstream ready yet. It needs better onboarding for people who have no idea how instances work, a more appealing front-end, easier ways to find communities and content, better moderation tools, maybe some other stuff too.
Overall though? Pretty neat place to be in right now.
I’m enjoying Lemmy as a content feed. As an interactive board though not as much. Finding things and rembering where content is can be confusing. Its definitely not as easy or user friendly as other sites/apps. Getting IRL friends to join feels like an impossible task unless they’re pretty interested in tech.
That said you get what you give and if we want to see more content, we should all interact more.
