this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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I hate to say this but Lemmy is way less user friendly than Reddit. I doubt anything close to 10% of reddit will come over here. This site should focus on improving new user acquisition.
Not a good name for a social media site. Google/Youtube searching "Lemmy" just gives results for a guitarist
The average joe doesn't understand how federation works
You have to decide which place to make an account
You have to write an essay to join (I've seen people complain about this)
The top instances look very political/left wing
If you're persistent, educate yourself, and make it through the process, you can join a site with ~1000 active users.
Following remote communities is unintuitive. You have to search the link from your instance to subscribe to another instance (e.g., if your account is on beehaw, you have to search !gaming@lemmy.ml. You can't click their subscribe button on lemmy.ml.)
You and I know that different instances of Lemmy are mutually accessible and so #3 and #5 are not a problem. But for the uneducated all the above are significant barriers for entry/retention.
#1 Same with a lot of new social media, discord actually meant something different before 2015
#2 They don't need to at a technical level
#3 If you find it challenging to decide which server to join then I really don't know what to tell you. Its a small barrier to entry and objectively a good thing. An small IQ test of sorts.
#4 I'd imagine this is for spam / bot protection, and it may change in the future. I kinda like it, it keeps a lot of toxic users / trolls out. Sure the community is smaller but its more inviting for those that took the time.
#5 How is that different from reddit? View r/all at anytime and it was composed of left wing articles and users.
#6 Not 100% sure what your arguing here
#7 I actually find the idea of similar communities on different instances confusing (eg. !memes@lemmy.ml & !memes@beehaw)
edit: spelling
edit 2: it may be a little confusing to users that all servers can talk to eachother through federation so thats probably what confuses people. This could be explained better on the join-lemmy webpage. either way this will probably be similar to mastadon in terms of how it'll go down, lots of users join, instances have a hard time keeping up at first, then they stabilize.
Personally I think the requirement to explain why you want to join a lemmy instance is 100% brilliant. If you can answer coherently you're clearly not a robot, and probably don't intend to spam.
The text field itself doesn't require any minimum or maximum character counts so there's no pressure to be wordy. In fact I think those who read that information appreciates when you can achieve some brevity but still communicate clearly in your own words why you're signing up.
Additionally different instances have different priorities and needs; so I suspect they can ask for even more information or writing samples if needed; or ask for as little as possible to discourage users from being too crazy.
100% agree, I kinda hope they keep it in a way because its probably better than most standard captchas.