Honestly, I think the future of fediverse advocacy for now should be recommending a specific instance and not explaining the federation part until they are using it

[–] Blaze@reddthat.com 4 points 4 months ago

It's the present already.

People want a URL, give them a few if they really want to choose.

Federation should stay behind the scenes

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Agreed - as Blaze always says, save the why and how it works (under the hood) for later and for now just show them the goods.

And when a major instance defederates from Lemmy.ml I will start recommending that exact instance to people.

Or, an admin at sh.itjust.works mentioned the possibility of automatically applying a user level block to it for all new users, along with a bot message about how to remove that block. As discussed above, it would be far from perfect (e.g. someone mentions that the genocide going on in Ukraine is bad and gets hit by many downvotes with no clue where they came from bc they are not shown notifications from the people who may reply to say how it is actually good though, bc Russia is the one doing it...), but indeed it would be better than now.

[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Hard agree. A while ago, Feddit UK nearly lost it's domain and I was a hard advocate of carving our own identity without using terms such as "Reddit", "Lemmy" or "Federation". Basically have our unique identity. As right now all I have told about it see it as a reddit knock-off.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 4 months ago

I would actually not go that far - I respect the devs enormously for having written the code and shared it with the entire world. If someone else wants to write new code - K/Mbin and Sublinks come to mind - then sure replace Lemmy for those instances that run that, but e.g. Lemmy.World is definitely a Lemmy and I'm okay with that.

I'm also okay with Fediverse - should I not be? I suppose an alternative is something that implements the ActivityPub protocol, but why not the Fediverse?

Basically I am okay with anything so long as people don't stumble upon it unawares.

But I do see your point that we can't just say that we are a Reddit knockoff, even though that's literally what we are. It should be the start of additional description. So far I call it "social media" - where people share and talk, bc that seems about right. "Link aggregator" doesn't do much for me, and suggests more of a purpose to read news stories rather than make our own posts.