There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven't seen it made often.

Let's just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That's to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.

Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.

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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yes, that is my proposal. Many people complain saying there are better ways to host instances but no one is willing to practice what they preach and actually do it. If you want to see change in the fediverse then you should step up and do it.

New users have a choice when joining, you should make a new instance and convince the new users why they should join. I would support a toggle on join-lemmy which lets them see what servers are geographically close, but that would be irrelevant before you set up an instance to pave the way.

If you "can't be bothered" then obviously you aren't as passionate about it as you claim to be.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world -3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Since when did I claim to be "passionate" about anything? My proposal concerns new users, it's in the title. I'm not a new user any more and I have a bunch of post and comments to my virtual name (not that it's important, sure). But I now see that it would have been better if I had been pushed to another server when I signed up. Hence the proposal.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 9 points 2 days ago

I'm sorry, I assumed by posting about it that you were passionate for this change. If you don't care that's fine - but I don't know why you posted about it then.