I have zero tech skills and I’m here I do think the emails back and forth to get my original log in was obnoxious, it literally took days, and I have no idea how to start communities, I have no idea what the “federation” or “fediverse” is, I don’t understand “instances” and I really do miss Reddit for how easy all those things are but I figure eventually I’ll get it and this will feel like home. If all you want to do is make an account to scroll it’s pretty easy but I do agree everything else is hard/obnoxious and it will definitely slow down growth. That said I was on reddit since almost the beginning and growing quickly only came in the past several years and it really destroyed the site, so growing slowly isn’t inherently a bad thing. I do wish there was simple videos to watch on things like how to make a community though
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
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Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
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Hmm, good idea, is there a 'newtolemmy' community?
My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.
The thing is, that's a fundamental feature of Lemmy. It's designed such that no one person or company controls the whole thing. Admins that have differing opinions can each have their own servers with whatever rules they want.
That makes it somewhat incompatible with a a basic signup page like what you're proposing, just like you can't have a generic "sign up for email" page without picking a specific provider. Having a huge number of users on a single server somewhat defeats the purpose of decentralization - you're back to a small number of people / a company having control over a major part of the ecosystem.
Perhaps it could redirect people to a randomly selected instance from a hand-picked list, but maybe that'd be even more confusing? I'm not sure.
Realistically the solution would be instances moving away from the Lemmy 'brand'. You could more easily direct users to a specific one and fast track newbies past all the fediverse details.
If we go with the email analogy, people rarely ever search for 'email', they just go to the specific ones they know. Then searching for lemmy gets you to places like join-lemmy.org that cares about the ecosystem, while terms analogous to gmail directs you more to a specific instance.
And I think this sort of branding model actually more compatible with the idea of decentralization. As a culture, I think we would better serve federation by directly linking and promoting our preferred instances, rather than harping on about federation and the lemmyverse.
Realistically the solution would be instances moving away from the Lemmy 'brand'
This is a great idea, and I think some instances do this. I seem to remember Beehaw taking this approach. Similar to forums - each forum has a different name even if they use the same software.
The tricky part for regular users to understand is that if they sign up on one server, they can still access content on others. Old-school internet users that used to use Usenet would understand it (Usenet functioned the same way) but the majority of users are used to centralized services these days, which makes it hard.
If we go with the email analogy, people rarely ever search for 'email', they just go to the specific ones they know.
I get it, but everyone going to gmail is not a good thing and never has been. The paradigm shift is more meaningful than simply growing lemmy as a community. Without that, the only difference from a mainstream social network today would be a handful of big players rather than just one.
When I first signed up here, or tried to sign up here, join-lemmy just didn't want to load anything. So I ended up going to bed and trying again the next morning. The next morning, it finally loaded the list of instances and going by the experience I had just had with the website battling to even load anything, I chose an instance advertised as "join here to reduce load on larger instances". And this instance just didn't want to load anything properly. Half of the images in posts just weren't showing up. And when I searched LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, only dead communities showed up and I'm pretty sure nothing from Blåhaj.
Then I went to world and still found it to be a ghost town. Eventually I realised that it was because 'English' wasn't selected in my language settings. Because I didn't realise that you have to ctrl click to select both 'undefined' and 'English'. I've used software where you have to ctrl click but I'm not sure I've ever come across another website where this is the case. And on this note, the whole fact that 'undefined' even exists as an option comes across as bush league and makes it look like a beta version.
Then there's another issue here. The god damn internal politics. So someone signs up on the insurance that says "focused on programming and development", then have everyone calling them a tankie or be cut off from multiple instances that have de-federated. It's clear to me now that 'ml' stands for "Marxist Leninist" but when you're new here and just looking at descriptions in join-lemmy, it just looks like a unique url like all the others.
Personally I think there's a lot of reasons that people would give up trying to get started here. That's before even trying to break them ice with a silly question in AskLemmy and getting snarky snark and smart asses in the replies. And I use that as an example because in my first week here, I saw someone post an innocent question in AskLemmy, get hostility as a response, then leave.
There are language settings? I signed up through the voyager app and I didn't see any language settings, is that why I can't see anything other laguages?
I've used software where you have to ctrl click but I'm not sure I've ever come across another website where this is the case
This is the standard behaviour on the web for lists where you can select multiple options. See the example here for instance: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/select#advanced_select_with_multiple_features
Most sites have a custom version though, since the built-in HTML element has such a poor user experience. I really wish browsers would just switch it to be a list with checkboxes.
The behaviour was based on Windows desktop apps in the 90s (where this behaviour was way more common), but after a while, most things switched to checkbox lists instead.
The behaviour was based on Windows desktop apps in the 90s
Ah, so that's why it was chosen as the default here.
Yeah I don't think the multi-select listboxes have really changed much since the days of Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape Navigator. Out of all the standard form components you can use in HTML, it's probably the one most in need of improvements.
Source?
What are you, a cop?
I just want to see what the OP is talking about without having to browse reddit myself.
How dare someone ask for something like... facts and evidence.
My anti-lemmy sentiment comes from raw experience like dumbfuck comments and witnessing the extent of ACAB brainrot.
How is a person supposed to know which instance to choose before knowing what each instance is even about? Or what an instance even is. The barrier to creating an account is too high.
If there was an account migration option it would be possible to throw users into a random instance which federates with everyone and later let them migrate with their account age and post history.
They're not. One can join any instance they like. But its like "what brand of toilet paper is someone to buy when they move out?" Thats for you to figure out. Ask someone, try a couple and settle for what helps you most.
That said, account migration would be nice although the possible issues are pretty brutal. An account is mostly a bunch of posts, comments and subscriptions. Reposting them would be fatal, relinking them would be dangerous. Only the subscriptions would be easy to move and i think that exists already.
I see your point. But imo its technically not really feasible.
No there are activation periods as well. Mods have to approve your account. You can't just jump in and get to know the place. There are so many different barriers to entry. And this is for people not even knowing whether Lemmy is a good place to go.
Maybe a LemmyAnon "tutorial" instance to dump all the users with no verification and let them get to know Lemmy before choosing an instance?
A single activation period for the account is honestly way better than what Reddit has where you're not allowed to post in a ton of large subreddits because you don't have enough karma when your account is created.
But people cannot sign in to the account while awaiting activation. This is a turnoff because people will leave and not come back when their account is activated.
A better option would be letting them sign in but only giving them comment/posting rights when their application gets approved.
The fediverse is too complicated which I said in detail on my post on c/fediverse currently its a mess each domain has hundreds of different sites that aren't interconnected and where you need to create a new account on each. If Lemmy had a front page like reddit and allowed for all its smaller communities to be coded and personalized to be completely different while allowing the top 25 posts every 24 hours to pop up and allowing a place to search for a specific community. We could still allow an approval process for specific communities but reddit would fall in months with how mods at reddit currently behave
Tip for you since it sounds you are genuinely trying it out but are running into issues: you can post and comment on outside Lemmy communities without creating a different account for the most part. Just navigate to lemmy.world/c/[community name]@[other site domain]. Example: https://lemmy.world/c/science_memes@mander.xyz means you can interact with the community on mander.xyz while staying on your lemmy.world account.
A Lemmy server agnostic link can be made in the form of ![community name]@[other site domain]. Example: !science_memes@mander.xyz, or !fediverse@lemmy.world to help people from anywhere on lemmy to link to c/fediverse.
There's still a lot of gaps like official methods to redirect post and comment links to your instance (I heard it was coming soon) It is indeed behind Reddit in a lot of technical and social aspects, but I think it's not completely a bad thing.