we need more users

[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.

[ano_ba_to@sopuli.xyz]

I've seen the same arguments against liberals here used against Bernie Sanders on Instagram. "Why aren't you doing more about Palestine?", "Why'd you let this happen?", "why are you too powerless to influence policies?". I know some bots follow a script. The only difference here is the framing.

[iamnorrealtakeyourmeds@lemmy.world]

Then start breeding yall

[iamnorrealtakeyourmeds@lemmy.world]

But do we want whatever users are still on Reddit? If they all come here, we will have to find a different place

[colesloth@discuss.tchncs.de]

I felt I was being pretty specific about "the most popular". If the most popular instance is dead, we got problems.

[iamnorrealtakeyourmeds@lemmy.world]

This, It is just big enough to be useful and reach specific niches. We do not need to be a massive giant monolith which will get flooded with corporate trolls, russian/israeli troll farms, undisclosed sponsored content...

Let just have a small wacko community in peace

[moakley@lemmy.world]

Alright, I'll make more content. Give me a month or two. I'm slow at drawing.

[blackn1ght@feddit.uk]

Your response is an example of what frustrates me with Lemmy. Anyone with a different opinion must be a fascist. No nuance. Just instantly labelling people. No wonder the numbers are dropping and not attracting new users.

Guess what? We can have people who aren't far left who aren't fascists. I'd rather see healthy discussions and debates than everyone patting each other on the back for saying "DAE capitalism bad".

[jenings@lemmy.world]

Not to get too political but Redgifs is banned in my state without Id verification. I would guess it’s coming if the fundamentalists continue to get their symbolic wins from the unrepentant rapist pedophiles thieves and drunks running th joint.

[openstars@piefed.social]

i found out recently that my mastodon server is blacklisted on many of mainstream ones not because there is some bad content there but because it federates with some servers that mods somewhere else consider harmful

Genuinely, why would they do that? Like does Mastodon software work differently than Lemmy's - is there some way that someone from one of THOSE places could post content onto your instance (I dunno, CSAM? or just some trolling or piracy or something that someone considers offensive), and thereby it could come in indirectly to theirs? It makes no sense to me, at least if we were talking Lemmy, but I am interested how Mastodon differs there.

[limelight79@lemmy.world]

Yeah part of the issue here is that there are so few users that the more niche topics just don't get a lot of traction.

For example, I help mod the Washington Capitals hockey team community, but mostly it's just two of us talking. We recently decided to stop posting game day threads for every game, because there'd be one comment in them (usually me), if we were lucky - and we were the last NHL team community to end the game day threads; most stopped long ago. The overhead just wasn't worth the reward. We decided we'd focus more on the general Hockey community, hoping to build that out a bit.

(We didn't give up entirely - we posted a sticky thread that is for all games, and we'll make a top level comment for each game in there, asking people to respond to that comment for that game. If they don't, not a major issue. This way we still have the forum for the game discussions without having to worry about posting it every time.)

[surewhynotlem@lemmy.world]

This is such an underrated point. If we want people to join Lemmy, we need an app called Lemmy, on every platform. And if we want to steal users from Reddit, make the UI a clone of the reddit app but better. And allow people to join via the app, not some separate website.