Kichae

The onboarding process should be happening after this point. People shouldn't be going "I want to join Lemmy!", because that's kind of a non-sensical statement. Lemmy is a website engine. They should be going "I want to join awesomewebsite.com. Oh, and look, I can see stuff from anotheraweseomewebsite.net, too! That's so cool!"

If the website itself cannot provide a compelling reason as to why someone should sign up for it, then why should they sign up for it? So that it can be a dumb-terminal for some other website?

But it's better from many angles that they are. Discoverability alone. Consistency of instance level rules. Theme.

It just makes sense on some level that sports communities would be on a sports-focused website, and such a website is where people whose primary interest is in discussing sports would have their accounts. From there, they can follow other topics they're interested in, but their primary focus is still on, I don't know, basketball or whatever.

Same for cars. Some of the most active forums on the internet are car ownership forums. If you could access CivicForums from IoniqForums, then it would make sense to do so. Much more sense than finding people discussing Hondas on lemmy.world and Hyundais on sh.itjust.works.

Just because you don't give a shit where these discussions are taking place, doesn't mean it makes sense for people to just shit them out anywhere.

Being decentralized and there being a significantly higher bar of entry aren't intrinsically linked. The only things easier about Reddit compared to a phpBB forum are that Reddit a) generates you a username, and b) has a mobile app that only works with reddit.com. Name generators can be included in the signup process, but we can't really drop having to point an app at a particular website in a distributed model.

The fact that "Lemmy" isn't a website or a single, definable place on the Internet is where the friction comes from. You can point to Reddit, and say you "saw x, y, and z on Reddit this morning" and it be a meaningful statement. You can't substitute "Lemmy" into that sentence, though, because there isn't a Lemmy.

There's a thousand Lemmys.

This.

There are rough edges to the actual onboarding experience, of course, but the joinlemmy and joinmastodon and joinwahtever websites really aren't a part of it. They're more of an ad for admins, demonstrating that there's an active network of sites already using the product. The fact that not even the product develoeprs seem to understand this is a real issue, though.

Honestly, we need to stop sending people to "Lemmy" or "Mastodon" or whatever. Those are website engines. It's like sending someone to "WordPress" when you want them to read your blog.

This is a man who famously stiffs everyone he hires. He thinks he's being ripped off because he believes anyone who actually pays for the things they purchase are suckers and idiots.

Honestly, I think federation being (mostly) invisible is actually part of the problem. Trying to make these spaces look like something they're not makes people believe they work in a way that they don't. It makes "Lemmy" look like wish-dot-com Reddit, and Mastodon look like temu Twitter.

This is all something new. This is a thousand Reddits, where you can see over the fence at what each other Reddit is talking about. It's ten-thousand Twitters, where you can talk to people on other Twitters.

If you could post on Facebook articles from Twitter, people would get that maybe they don't see every single comment, or every single Facebook article all of the time. This would be understood. Twitter and Facebook look like, and are discussed as if, they're two totally different websites. The same would be true of AVForums and CivicForums, if they could cross-post.

But fediverse platforms go out of their way to hide what they are, and to strip each website of its identity. And that seems wildly fucked up to me.

People need to stop sending people to "join ___" sites. I get why they are, or at least were, necessary, but they're totally superfluous when users are making recommendations to other users.

Just recommend a website for them to join. Word of mouth + systematized signup makes zero sense.

I see the same names appearing over and over again in different communities. This is, of course, because this is still a relatively small space, but it's something that has the potential to remain true even as things grow, because we don't all need to be in the same politics community, or in the same gaming community, etc.

There's more active moderation.

Tan Eggs.

There are still hiccups with nodeBB's federation, and it's not at all clear to me yet that it supports back-fetching forum posts yet. The devs are being super responsive, though, and I think we'll see the rough edges sanded off quickly.

Readying an action taking two actions and a reaction. I get why -- Ready itself costs an action, and then you still have to pay the original action cost -- but I think it's all a step too far. I've increasingly tried to run my table fiction-first, and I let players ready actions of any cost for just a reaction (assuming they have the actions remaining to actually do the thing)

Trump wants to own hotels and resorts in a razed and reconstructed Gaza. Do you think he cares where the Palestinians go? Do you think the rest of the world will want to look more deeply into it if he just says "they've been relocated, no I won't tell you to where"?

He's presenting a Palästinenserproblem. People should be watching very carefully.

Is there an illusion of privacy? The persistent, unprompted belief it exists isn't an illusion. It's a user-generated fantasy.