we need more users

[pudutr0n@lemmy.world]

Well I guess you're right and there is a lot of hostility towards certain thoughts in most instances. Everyone holds something sacred I guess.

[cracks_inthewalls@sh.itjust.works]

I think part (though not all) of the issue is discoverability. There's other communities where this isn't as prevalent, but a) they're not always easy to find, and b) for this as well as other reasons, they might not be super active (if people don't know it exists, who's posting?)

I get around the first bit by trawling All New once and a while. One feature I will say I liked on reddit was the random community function. But while I like that it's a smaller userbase here for some reasons, it does mean less diversity of interests.

[clamdrinker@lemmy.world]

It's kind of a chicken and the egg problem though, that happens on any new place, so it's tough to sell them on that unless they already like what's being talked about. I think it's probably better to stick to the fundamentals of the fediverse and what makes it better than a centralized platform. In this phase of Lemmy's popularity we need people that stick around and build communities, and they can only really be enticed to do that based on the merits of the platform.

[ulterno@programming.dev]

I advertised Lemmy to my friends a few times and they have now stopped replying to my messages

[sturgist@lemmy.ca]

Lemmynsfw coming in clutch

[sturgist@lemmy.ca]

I just keep sending them memes I know they'll like. I've had 3 friends joing various instances so far, because after a while they just go:

Man....where do you get these memes?!

[farraigeplaisteach@lemmy.world]

Not memes but I keep the address bar in the screen shot.

[ulterno@programming.dev]

Ah well, I am not good at that.
The best I have gotten people to say is how I "know so much" about stuff at work and the best I can point them to is Wikipedia, StackOverflow and the like, which of course they aren't really interested in doing and their lines are probably just a way to try and flatter me.

[sturgist@lemmy.ca]

Fair play, whatever works is what's best

[sturgist@lemmy.ca]

At least they're flattering you

[jode@pawb.social]

Oh they won't ban it they'll hide 18+ subs behind a pay wall and call it "premium access"

[sortekanin@feddit.dk]

It might be because I am in Denmark which has quite a functioning and lawful system and where I see the most graffiti is in public transport, like on trains and train stations. The transport company spends a lot of money cleaning that graffiti, making public transport more expensive for everyone else (hence antisocial behavior).

So I can understand where you are coming from but my perspective is just different.

[ulterno@programming.dev]

Honestly, it is not fun being flattered in a way that makes me try to give them an answer that they will ignore.

Imagine a C++ compiler with feelings, reading your code ignoring the return value of a [[nodiscard]] function.

[burninator05@lemmy.world]

I feel like that's effectively the same thing.

[whyjiffie@sh.itjust.works]

Piefed.social is the flagship instance, comparable to lemmy.ml.

comparable in status, or in opinions?

[angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com]

And you can say "block anything related to that," but I don't want to stop hearing about it entirely. Just not the only topics.

And even on the few active subs that aren't Trump or Linux, there's a lot of commenters that can't shut up about Trump or Linux, particularly ones that think you're a bad person if you ever stop talking about Trump.

[dantel@programming.dev]

I'm a reddit user and that's also where I first heard about lemmy the first time.

Yesterday I decided to give it a try, current events pushed me away from everything American and so I thought it was about time.

I searched for something like 'lemmy getting started' and landed on this site:
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html

So the first greeting is a wall of text. After I read through it, I found myself here:
https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Now I got a bunch of options with no real way to evaluate what's what. I spent some time there looking through the options and didn't really know what to choose and what the impact would be. I used a search engine again to look for some opinions about the biggest ones which lead me nowhere, mostly.

So I kinda gave up and selected programming.dev because that's close enough to what I do professionally. I clicked on join and was presented with this
https://programming.dev/signup

So I don't know if that differs from instance to instance, but you need a moment to process this. The first few fields are obvious but then it starts to get a little weird. Instead of a checkbox or even implicit accepting of TOS and privacy policy (by registering here you agree to....) you have to take or copy paste that exact sentence into that answer box with a preview button(?) and then fill in the captcha. After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.

But it didn't end here. Because I found that the webui wasn't that great on mobile, I wanted an Android app. So I ended up here: https://join-lemmy.org/apps

And yet again was confronted with a bunch options I somehow had to evaluate. I'm still in the process finding an app I really like.

Now I know this is no rocket science, and having options is a good thing usually.

But still considering the average usually not tech savvy user, all of that is too much by quite a bit. That's overwhelming for the majority of people.

This whole thing needs to be a 10 second streamlined process. There should be one button to get you started. The instance selection site tells you: 'You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn't matter which one you choose.'

So if that's the case, why bother the user with it? I admit I know jack shit about the fediverse, but if I were to design such a thing, I'd separate the IdP (identity provider) from the service/content providers. Have a couple of them redundantly, hosted by different parties so one entity can not shut down everything. Let the user register once, replicate that identity across the IdPs and let some interest selection wizard determine which content instances the use should be added to.

I know that's a big architecture change and will never happen. So maybe have that one obvious registration routine for a user and choose a first instance for the user based on interests or randomly (from a curated list to prevent users landing on some extreme instances) if the user can not be bothered to fill in their interests.

Have one default app which is good and recommended that. Let the app have sensible defaults (like the sorting thing), present most popular content first to hook the user.

Let the user look for alternatives later if they want to do that.

Don't let the user do all the homework upfront before they even know whether they even care and if it's worth the effort. Most people simply won't do it.

PS. Nope I do not know about 'Piefed'. I'll check it out later. It wasn't mentioned on all that sites that I looked at and that's part of the problem.

That's just my 2 cents.

[quill7513@slrpnk.net]

status. part of the impetus of the development of piefed was a frustration with how the lemmy devs treated people who tried to get onboarded to help with the development of lemmy. i can go into more depth about how this is a reflection of how the lemmy devs see the world, but i don't necessarily feel like hashing all that out when i have bigger fascists to fry

[farraigeplaisteach@lemmy.world]

Comments (quality ones) are the life of a community.

[sturgist@lemmy.ca]

Ooft... yeah, fair enough. I don't get the joke, but I got the sentiment.