With previous Rexit’s like the API debarcle etc. many users were left looking for an alternative, but with decision fatigue and bad UX etc. most did not find the Fediverse a viable option.
What needs to still improve, how can we be ready this time?
Instance selection at sign-up remains the primary barrier to entry.
I think there needs to be a quick question form upon sign-up, going over the biggest differences between instances. Such as: “do you want downvotes activated? Do you want to see NSFW? Do you want little, some, or heavy automated blocking of potentially objectionable material?” etc, then have the sign-up page provide you with up to three instance options based on your selected preferences.
Otherwise you’re either forcing users to do this research on their own (“ew, homework just to sign up for social media? no thanks”) or they’re going in blind and selecting at random, very likely ending up on an instance with qualities/features they don’t like.
A separate issue: during the big 2023 rexit (when I moved over), the primary instance that most new users joined, lemmy.world, was a buggy, buggy mess, practically unusable for the first few days. I don’t know if that was specifically because of the influx of new users or if it just worsened problems that had skated by when there were only a handful of users before, but I imagine that turned away quite a few potential new Lemmings. Hopefully that won’t be an issue this time around, but I guess that depends on how big the exodus is and how much Lemmy infra has strengthened in the 2.5 years since.
One option is to do this for them, and just send the link to the instance most suited to your current audience when recommending using Lemmy, rather than trying to explain what instances are, because they don’t need to know that to use it.
I think there needs to be a quick question form upon sign-up, going over the biggest differences between instances. Such as: “do you want downvotes activated? Do you want to see NSFW? Do you want little, some, or heavy automated blocking of potentially objectionable material?” etc, then have the sign-up page provide you with up to three instance options based on your selected preferences.
Dude. I’m saying this completely unironically: A personality quiz recommending you your instance “house” upon sign-up would be fun AF lol 🎉
There’s only a few communities I’d be interested in seeing come over and they’ve already made it clear they’re not interested in moving because of reddits enshittification. I don’t think lemmy should cater to people who can’t be bothered to get over the small initial hump of choosing an instance. We don’t need more users just for the sake of more users anyway. People like that aren’t bringing anything to the table anyway.
It’s a shame because once you get it, it’s actually kinda fun. Like choosing a Harry Potter house lol
The front page of leminal.space is a soothing experience everytime I log on. Their slogan is literally:
Take a break from the slow-burn apocalypse of late stage capitalism’s race to the bottom
I really hope the patience for trying to learn what the fediverse instances are and how to actually get an account dissuades a lot of the reactionaries and impending tiktok brainrot lol
From a technical standpoint: No.
I’m on probably my dozenth account now. The majority of my jumps are because the instance I’d chosen became unstable, had long and/or frequent outages, or just died and went away completely with no warning.
Even the biggest instance I’ve ever joined, lemmy.world, choked whenever there’s a large exodus from Reddit or a lemmy upgrade or a bug farts in Belgrade.
The instances with fairly open enrollment will likely break under the load. The smaller instances with ridiculous sign-up requirements and/or a need for manual approval of accounts will discourage people from using Lemmy at all.
And because of those technical issues…
New instances will pop-up quickly from determined Redditors, because the stuff that’s already around can’t keep up. Then those new instances will become the heavy hitters. The ones we have now will be vulnerable to atrophy and becoming insular. The overall Fediverse will be vulnerable to the silo effect, diluting its value to folks, as it will basically be RedFed versus OldFed.
From an end-user standpoint: Also no.
The “culture” would shift practically overnight. I’ve already seen that happen. When I first got here, people were actually kind to each other. Users stood up for others and disparaged others for being hostile, aggressive, overly negative, etc. Then we had the API-calypse surge. Now those radically kind days are long gone. It happened fast. I tried to keep it up in my own small little corner, but even I don’t do as good a job as I should.
While the Fediverse may be “strong” overall, the individual pieces are too fragile to handle a significant Rexit onslaught. If even a small fraction of all Reddit users came to the Fediverse en-masse, this place as we know it would be gone.
Yeah IMO getting popular ruined reddit.
May I ask what your prior instances were?
It’s been so many over the years and I really don’t recall the names of a lot of instances I’ve been on. I’m here on .zip because .wtf was having major stability issues a while back. Every time I’d get on, it was down. This happened for days/weeks at a time and I got irritated. Prior to that it was .world, similar story. Lots of stability issues on days and times I’d normally try to hop on there. Plus there was an update fiasco, or some other issue I don’t recall, that took it down for a bit. Prior to that I was on one of the kbin instances that is gone entirely now.
I don’t recall the first instance I joined when I first signed up. I had read that new folks should help spread the load by going to lesser used instances instead of all signing up for the big ones. That first instance was only around for maybe a couple of months. There was one that used the “magazine” concept for subscriptions, maybe kbin, I dunno.
As I said, it’s been a lot and I’ve been around long enough that I can’t recall all the names. Plus, the kicker to all this? Those site status trackers are highly, highly unreliable. When lemmy.world was down, at one point for like a full day or so, the site monitoring link showed all green. It’s one reason I stopped even bothering to try and troubleshoot on my end in case it’s something I’ve done because that started to become a major waste of my time.
There’s one major oversight here that needs to be addressed if Lemmy/Piefed were to suddenly gain a glut of new users. How bans work.
Currently, instance bans and community bans are treated as two separate things. When a user is banned from an instance, you’ll often see in the logs a bunch of community bans alongside it at once. These are communities that user has posted on. An instance ban automatically applies hard-bans to communities they have interacted in from that instance. But the problem here is its only communities they’ve interacted in.
The instance ban itself is simply a rejection of federation. It doesn’t block users from posting in communities on that instance - only the community bans do that. It just means their posts won’t federate out. This means that an instance banned user can continue to be a nuisance in most communities (or all, if they are pre-emptively banned) on an instance locally - and the moderators of that community and instance won’t even know. With larger numbers of users would also mean larger amounts of trolls and incompatible users, which could greatly increase the chance of people simply vandalising communities and no-one even noticing.
I’ve been SLOWLY getting into the Fediverse for a little over a year now. My biggest gripe has always been discovery and availability. I feel like there is a lot more effort required to find people/communities I am interested in. Then if/when I do find them they are often not very active.
So yeah I’ll say what everyone else is saying that UX needs some work. I used Lemmy for a while last year and just couldn’t get used to the interface, I’m not Feddit and like this interface more. But it could use some work on mobile imo.
On mobile Voyager is quite nice imo
Maybe pushing Piefed instead of lemmy would be the way to go. Piefed has a more beginner friendly UI and makes it easier to find new communities
with new reddit, the writing was on the wall. a wave of bans is what helped start lemmy long before the api debaucle. when that happened, there was finally enough content that this became a usable replacement.
we are definitely ready for more content
Is reddit blocking VPNs now? I don’t use reddit anymore, but sometimes I search something on the web and like it or not, redditors in niche communities have good answers to uncommon questions. Definitely better than can be found on quora or other places.
But it doesn’t let me view them, supposedly because I’m using a VPN now…
If that’s the case, fuck spez and all corporate sellouts. Reddit used to be a mecca for freedom of association…
Swiss IPs tend to get through no problem. Whenever I have that issue I just swap to the Switzerland server.
I’ve found that tor canvwork. Just refresh the connection until reddit doesn’t block. Same for VPN location. Just choose other locations until one works.
They block unless you’re logged in. It’s very annoying, still have to use reddit occasionally to find some info or something niche (admittedly not as bad as finding something on discord).
Well they blocked every account associated with my IP, so I’m not doing that either.
Are there any third-party reddit readers that circumvent this? Or did their API shenanigans block that, too?
Look up Redlib
I hadn’t really tried to be honest, just using my old account until they start asking for age verification, then I’d look at other solutions.
I use RedReader without an account, connected through a VPN. It’s FOSS, but with these settings, it’s really slow. Okay for text and images, bad for videos.
VPN is irrelevant here if you will need a government ID to access it, what difference does it make what country you pretend to be from
Ready for a bunch of teens coming in and trashing the place? No.
Wow, discrimination really makes this place that much similar to reddit. I’d really consider who really is the one trashing the place.
Not normal teens either. The tiktok/ipad kid gens who developmentally missed the bus for normal critical thinking skills.
Get ready for sleuths of comment spam with only “Bro thinks” “crash out” and “Not that deep” lmfao
Gatekeeping, nice.
Teens will probably find a way to verify using fake info. It seems like it’s generally the old and jaded who are willing to dump things out of stubbornness.
deleted by creator
Algo’s for discoverability are needed Quiblr does it nicely but im not sure if the project is still supported and there is no app
Sign up is still a confusing, exclusionary, inaccessible mess. So, no.
We need more cat forums.
This. Video games too. And porn for that matter. We’re overall a little weak on the trifecta of primary internet subject matter.
At least we’re solid on owls though, my enduring admiration to our dedicated owl posters.
Unironically this. We need cute animals. Cats, owls, moths, capibaras, pangolins. If we’re not gonna have one of the two “true movers” of the internet (porn and correcting people who are wrong) we need something good to compensate.
Lemmy has pretty active communities for both bunnies and foxes.
There are a lot of owls. But also cat, dogs, etc - https://piefed.social/topic/wholesome
Every time I think about starting a community about one of my hobbies, I look at a random modlog and realize I don’t want any part of it.
The trick is starting a community, but delegating moderation to someone else. Admin ≠ Mod.
I’ve genuinely been thinking about starting nsfw fandom (anime/games) communities centered around more female or queer orientated audiences but I don’t know if I’ll want to deal with moderation and having to keep it active…
Edit: I also wish we had more silly mini comms of things. I have a family member who finds a new cat sub like every week, but we don’t really have that here.
There’s some anime titties but not enough to go around.
And guitars.
I don’t want people from Reddit here.
The fact that half of Twatter moved to Bluesky instead of Mastodon is a blessing.
ActivityPub is by design a data harvesting goldmine, the fact that it flies under the radar is the only saving grace.
Tbf, the Twitter exodus was kind of a different enshittification. There’s less of a need for filter on that because the issue was “Stay if you’re a nazi” not “Stay if you want to keep tolerating more and more frustrating UI issues and barriers”
So whereas anyone who was looking to leave Twitter we could give the benefit of the doubt because of that implicit filter, it’s not the same for Reddit and I expect swathes of “devil’s advocate” conservative trolls to suddenly pop out of the woodwork looking for new homes [sources of validation].
Digg just crying in the corner right now.
Digg already came and went again
I knew it would lmao
Necromancy is more an art than a science
