People need to realize you can use alternatives

  • kadu@lemmy.world
    35·
    2 years ago

    I’m using Lemmy.world, but I still need to get away from the traditional mental model of usernames. It bothers me a bit knowing someone could use my username on another server and interact with the servers I do… But then again, nothing prevents someone from creating my Gmail on Yahoo. So it’s just a matter of getting used to things.

  • zouhair@lemmy.ml
    331·
    2 years ago

    The documentation explaining how fediverse works is so bad. It’s so long and convoluted anyone new just can’t be bothered reading it.

        • SolidGrue@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 years ago

          Someone posted a good infographic about the fediverse over on kbin in RedditMigration (another complicated wrinkle in this whole fediverse thing) that did a great job explaining this whole fediverse thing.

          If only I could link it.

          Edit: jerboa editor doing me dirty

    • sylver_dragon@lemmy.world
      10·
      2 years ago

      Docu-what now?

      Seriously, if the average user needs to understand distributed systems to play in the fediverse pool, they are going to land back at Reddit. Just get people in the door (any door) and fight the technical debt that creates later.

      Sure, it’s a shit plan. But, it’s the only way to really capitalise on the current moment. With both Twitter and Reddit blasting away at their own feet, there is a real opportunity for something better to step up. The fediverse can be that thing. But, not if people end up gatekeeping it. Less Stallman style, “RTFM!” And more, “hey, welcome. Let’s get you set up.”

        • amki@feddit.de
          3·
          2 years ago

          I agree, the first page is already too much text, where is the easy to consume infographic explaining it in comic style? :/

      • kofe@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 years ago

        Idk what’s going on, I just know I’m ready for open source options. I’m signed up here and mastodon now and plan to use the duration of the reddit strike to learn more about these platforms, delete my activity on others, and slowly build communities so I’m not reliant on others for news and learning.

        I don’t think it’s too difficult to figure out. Seems more like a matter of shifting activity to keep people engaged. I’m far from tech literate, though.

    • OzoneThePirate@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      2 years ago

      I recognize it’s easier said than done obviously and I don’t have a good solution to propose; but if there was a way to make the app UI more user friendly it might help the understandability of the fediverse and subsequently lower the barrier to entry. Unless someone can figure out how to make it more seemless of an experience, it’s gonna be hard to get massive traction

  • WalterzarBoBalterzar@lemmy.world
    27·
    2 years ago

    I tried to make an account on lemmy.ml and it looks like their servers are (understandably) overloaded

    I ended up choosing lemmy.world instead

    My understanding is I’m not missing out on anything by chosing a less-popular instance. Did I get that right?

      • NekoRogue@beehaw.org
        21·
        2 years ago

        Oof, I can see why some of those instances are blocked, though. Since I’m on Beehaw, I checked their block list and…wow. Scrolled through each one for a few minutes and now I’m hoping I’m not on some kind FBI list for it. A few highlights from my research expedition:

        • A meme featuring various characters (MLP, Vaporeon, Peter Griffin, etc) unironically mourning Ted Kaczynski
        • NSFL gore
        • People calling for the execution of cops who stopped rioters on Jan 6
        • SO. MUCH. LOLICON.
        • “Hahaha look at this WOKE LIB 🤣🤣🤣”
        • QANON. QANON EVERYWHERE.

        I was only on each one for a minute or so. I don’t think I’m missing out on anything except maybe being put on some kind of list.

        • voxel@sopuli.xyz
          94·
          2 years ago

          same, I’m on Sopuli and their Blocklist is pretty short but has the worst ones.

          they are really, really bad and some are straight up illegal in some countries.

          Mostly far-right ones, straight up terrorism (seriously there are people with RAF and other terrorist organization’s logos on their profile pics there), nsfl gore videos (like people dying and being tortured type of stuff), and nsfw ones full of underage anime girls in suggestive poses…

          lemmygrad is probably the worst one out of all of them, just because of it’s size (tankie terrorist group)

          • Skelectus@suppo.fi
            3·
            2 years ago

            I haven’t blocked anything on my instance yet since I haven’t encountered that but maybe I should copy sopuli’s blocklist.

          • Duży Szef [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
            2·
            2 years ago

            lemmygrad is probably the worst one out of all of them, just because of it’s size (tankie terrorist group)

            Now that’s some new far-right apologism I’ve never seen before, I’m rather happy with lemmygrad being the big one and not some place like evropa.ss lmao

            One fascist is one too many either way

            • Drew Got No Clue@lemmy.world
              22·
              2 years ago

              I’ve just finally caved in and visited lemmygrad for the first time and oh, boy! I’ve heard the sound of my grey matter atrophy

          • Preston Maness ☭@lemmygrad.ml
            1·
            2 years ago

            same, I’m on Sopuli and their Blocklist is pretty short but has the worst ones.

            they are really, really bad and some are straight up illegal in some countries.

            Mostly far-right ones, straight up terrorism (seriously there are people with RAF and other terrorist organization’s logos on their profile pics there), nsfl gore videos (like people dying and being tortured type of stuff), and nsfw ones full of underage anime girls in suggestive poses…

            lemmygrad is probably the worst one out of all of them, just because of it’s size (tankie terrorist group)

            Ah yes. There’s far-right terrorism, NSFL gore, CSAM, but it’s the commies that are “the worst one out of all of them.”

        • amki@feddit.de
          2·
          2 years ago

          Even if you wouldn’t like it, the cool thing here is you can decide for yourself. If… you feel the need to do so.

        • Boe6@beehaw.org
          1·
          2 years ago

          I saw how long the list is and got kinda concerned I might miss out on content since I’m on beehaw, but now it just sounds like I’m getting sheltered from all the internet wackjobs lol

    • darkstar@lemmy.ml
      3·
      2 years ago

      Same… why would I use a smaller instance when the bigger one has more stuff on it? Maybe I just don’t understand this instance thing properly, it all just feels so fragmented

      • neo (he/him)@lemmy.comfysnug.spaceEnglish
        12·
        2 years ago

        Same… why would I use a smaller instance when the bigger one has more stuff on it? Maybe I just don’t understand this instance thing properly, it all just feels so fragmented

        You don’t NEED to be on the big instance in order to participate on the big instance.

        That’s the true beauty of what we’re doing here.

      • NebulaBC@beehaw.org
        6·
        2 years ago

        It’s mainly a thing of controlling your own stuff if you’re speaking of self hosted servers. If you mean just smaller instances in general, it’s normally because you prefer their management/moderation. You can still view all of the stuff from the other instances just fine even if you’re on a single user instance.

      • Galiratabbycat@lemmy.sdf.org
        4·
        2 years ago

        Like so many other people here. The federation concept is completely new to them and over time people will settle down and get used to how it works. Maybe people will set up their own instances for the ultimate name swag.

      • Silviecat44@vlemmy.net
        4·
        2 years ago

        Imagine an Instance as an email address. You can still access any content from any instance (mostly). All posts and comments just go through your instance for you to see them

        • f_lambda@lemmy.fmhy.ml
          1·
          2 years ago

          You can even see it looking at the usernames of people in different instances. For example, I see your username as @Silviecat44@vlemmy.net, which pretty much identically follows the format of an email address.

  • Menachem@midwest.social
    181·
    2 years ago

    tbf people just wanna sign up and click on funny links, not browse through 100 rando instances to find the one that lines up with their exact interests and wait for approval and worry about uptime and whether their instance will still exist in a year

    • lemillionsocks@beehaw.org
      4·
      2 years ago

      I feel that, while lemmy is still a work in progress, it is already pretty adequate for solving this need. If you want to subscribe to other instances you can do it from within your insance by going up to communities and searching. You can also click the all tab and see a bunch of instances from around lemmy that your instance is federated with.

      I think mastadon struggled with this because the twitter model is to follow people and depending how far removed the servers are this can be trickier. Compared to lemmy where people interested in a single subject will likely target and find the subject theyre interested in and bring themselves together naturally.

      Furthermore I think some people are splitting up and dividing into sub instances and tiny subjects a little prematurely. Reddit didnt get super esoteric with it’s subs until it got big and the larger subs either declined or got too noisy to talk about certain things. Like for example how beehaw has an operatingsystems instance instead of a linux, ubuntu, macos, windows, fedora, archinux, opensuse, openbsd, etc. Right now there arent enough of us that we dont need to subdivide.

      • thegiddystitcher@beehaw.org
        2·
        2 years ago

        I’ve seen people literally signing up here just to make like 50 empty communities and not post or comment on anything at all. Definitely a lot of folks just trying to stake some territory that they think will be valuable in the future.

        • lemillionsocks@beehaw.org
          1·
          2 years ago

          Im sure some of it is staking out territory, but I think a good chunk of it is just that modern reddit mindset. The mindset is that of course you cant have good gaming discussion on gaming you need to have truegaming, and games, and linux_gaming, and patientgamers, and etc. The thing is you can and things are small enough on all instances even lemmy.ml and beehaw that you can talk about it in one place.

          • Manticore@beehaw.org
            2·
            2 years ago

            The reason reddit had so many is that it would rapidly homogenise into giant echo chambers with minimal community. Minority perspectives were supressed or drowned out by lurker voting.

            New subs were being made to recapture giant subs’ original intentions, or specialise, yo put minority perspectives of the Hot page and curate a community as a result.

            Lemmy isn’t big enough to homogenise like that, at least not yet.

          • MentallyExhausted@reddthat.com
            1·
            2 years ago

            I’m pretty confident we’ll eventually see some form of voluntary synchronization between identical communities added to either the codebase or a popular client app. “Owning” an individual instance’s community will be worthless.

            (Wish I had the !remindme bot right now)

        • Manticore@beehaw.org
          12·
          2 years ago

          I also like the beehaw has a mission for community in mind, supported by having an application process; and their having prepared umbrella communities that will prevent echo chambers.

          Beehaw is definitely getting hammered too though; it’s probably the second- or third-largest instance atm.

    • Sinnoh@feddit.deEnglish
      31·
      2 years ago

      Let me see if I underatand this correctly:

      If I create an account on a random, small instance. And then go to the “all communities” feed. I can automatically see all communities that are in my instance. In addition to that, I can see all communities of other Lemmy instances, that are “federated”. But I cannot see other communities from other nstances, unless I go on there, find the communitis and manually subscribe to them (I believe there are other ways to get them to show up, like using the search etc.?)

      So, as a normal user. Who’s just looking for a replacement for /r/all, wouldn’t joining the largest lemmy instance that is fedarated to many others (Just by how many users it has, because it’s the users who link instances by their actions?) make perfect sense?

      • Yozul@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        The all communities tab should be showing you communities from every instance you are federated with. It’s true that they won’t show up in your feed until someone on your instance connects to the instance it’s on at least once, but you don’t need to be on a massive server to be connected to all the major communities right from the start.

        • MBM@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          This. There’s no need to join the biggest instance, as long as you’re not among an instance’s first users you won’t notice much difference.

    • socsa@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 years ago

      Idk I kind of think it having a bit more complexity might help ward off enshitification

    • Slashzero@hakbox.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      Very true. It would be sad to build up a persona on a smaller instance to then have it go dark and take your user with it. Other than losing your collection of “upvotes,” you can just recreate a new user with the same display name on another instance and keep going. 👍

      Holy crap, you can do Slack style emoticons? Huzzah! 🎉

  • pinkpatrol@anarch.is
    9·
    2 years ago

    I setup Anarch.is today. Feel free to create an account. Still need to write-up guidelines, enable community creation, etc. but it’s ready if you want to post/comment on other instances.

    If we run into server load problems i’ll upgrade it. 😎

  • decksdark@lemmy.ml
    9·
    2 years ago

    I chose lemmy.ml based on two things:

    • I wanted a server that wasn’t likely to close I don’t really know for sure, but I imagine it’s easy to underestimate how much money or time is required to run a server. And I’d really prefer not having to worry about migrating. The ‘run by Lemmy’s developers’ part makes me think that either the risk will be lower or the people running the server will know how to prevent reaching a point like that.
    • I didn’t want to join a very specific instance As I see it, there are two possible scenarios:
      • The instance I join will affect the content I’m exposed (and not exposed) to, in which case I want to experience ‘the whole internet’ rather than a section of it.
      • The instance I choose is irrelevant to the content I get, in which case, (apart from community rules) it shouldn’t really matter which one I choose, so I would just join the biggest instance.

    Still something that could help with the choosing-an-instance process is to display in the list of servers the community rules and if they are blocking certain communities.

    • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
      6·
      2 years ago

      This was pretty much exactly my thought process. My biggest concern here is account stability-from what I can tell, if your instance gets taken down by its owners, your account is gone.

      So until the devs figure out a way to centralize account credentials so that isn’t an issue, I’d much rather join on a big instance than a small one, especially one that the devs of lemmy themselves own. They have a clear interest in keeping it running, so the chances of my account vanishing are small, just like with bigger social media sites.

      The hard reality here is that, much like in real life markets, federated social media will likely tend toward a small number of very large instances and lots of significantly smaller ones. Most people want a stable, consistent experience and don’t want to worry about losing communities or accounts. And unless an instance is STRICTLY policing it’s communities, like lemmygrad for instance, then I think we will see the same thing happen with communities-right now there are lots of communities that are basically identical, and I think we’ll see one or two of each become the “main” ones people use-and those will likely be on larger instances.

      • rothaine@beehaw.org
        74·
        2 years ago

        so the chances of my account vanishing are small

        As long as you don’t mention Tiananmen Square or the CCP’s ongoing genocide of Uyghurs 🙃

        • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
          4·
          2 years ago

          I keep seeing people joke about this-do the mods here really ban people for talking about it? It seems like it’s a bit of a meme here…

    • Cambionn@feddit.nl
      1·
      2 years ago

      You worry it’ll close if you choose a smaller server, but you don’t mind your server being instable due to being over capacity (something it’s already having issues with, hence asking people not to join)? Like, no matter if the servers goes down due to it being over it’s capacity or due to quiting, you still can’t use it… Sure it may come back up, but why not join a stable (semi-)big sized instance instead that run smoothly for you and doesn’t cause more trouble for the devs?

      I mean, you trust the developers to keep things running smoothly, but you don’t trust their message to not join because they currently can’t…

      • Einar@lemmy.ml
        1·
        2 years ago

        Correct me if I’m wrong, but being over capacity will likley get sorted. Quitting is permanent.

  • deadcat@aussie.zone
    8·
    2 years ago

    New user, signed up on an alternative. It isn’t intuitive to add a community from another server. Got there eventually though!