Reddit is starting to suck more and more everyday so here I am. A couple of questions -
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I created my account at lemmy.ca, but most people I have seen have lemmy.world accounts. Am I missing out on anything by not having a lemmy.world account?
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Reddit has an offical subreddit for Reddit news. Does Lemmy have any offical communities?
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On Reddit, you can’t post on some subreddits if you do not have enough karma or if your account is not old enough. Are there any rules like that on Lemmy?
Thank you!
There’s also no fix for the “onboarding problem”. That “problem” is federation itself.
Well, there are some proposals to change this. I’d say it’s fixable by technology to some degree. For example instead of a sign up page that directly signs someone up with the specific instance, we could have a more general Fediverse signup page. Maybe ask the new user a few questions what they envision their instance to be. If they’re more aligned with this set of rules or the other. If they want “free speech” or a place with more moderation and less argumentative people. And then make some suggestions.
Or instead of just signing them up with whatever instance they visited first, display a list of the current instance and 5 other random ones, shuffle them and make them deliberately click on one of them.
That’d all help. Of course it can’t be solved 100%. But we could at least make an effort to do something about it.
That’s what join-lemmy.org does. It asks 2 questions:
Yeah. My proposal is to replace the “Sign up” entry on every single instance with a page like that. And move the actual sign up one level further down, so everyone needs to click through that process.
Why? That’s really ineffective and just looks bad imo. That’s just a solution to people linking instances to join instead of leading people to join-lemmy.org.
Because what the user wants is to sign up on Lemmy. We have to meet them at exactly that point. When they click on “Sign up”. And then our motive comes at play. We want to say to them »Hey stop, In case you don’t know, the Fediverse works differently than other social media platforms you might be used to. You have to make a decision here.« And I think it’s super effective to do it at that point. Doing it later is too late, because then they’re already signed up on a random place without being informed. And doing it earlier is inconvenient. They might not be motivated to find out yet. Or it’s a hassle to gather that info yourself without even knowing it’s a thing.
And why is the way the Fediverse works looking bad? If it seems that way to you, you’re might be wrong here. So even more reason to prominently display these kinds of things.
And it doesn’t have to be complicated. As with software design in general, don’t overwhelm the user with options. Just offer a description on what’s happening and why. And give some sane default options. Don’t make it more than let’s say 5-10. And it’s just one click more in the process. It’s not too hard for the user to click once more if it’s for a good cause. And if done right, they could just randomly click on something if in doubt.
I’d just make it like in my earlier proposal. Add the page. Force the user to choose. Either they want to answer a few questions and get a tailored instance. Or sign up at the current instance. Or sign up at one of the 4 other instances we promote for a better distribution. And then continue to ask for a username and password.
That’s extra work to be done when we already have a join-lemmy.org website by the official devs that does what you want. People changing the link in their comments from lemmy.world to join-lemmy.org is not hard, is it?
But why have an extra website? I just don’t see the point. That’s just extra work. And a good amount of people will never find out it’s there and get here in a different way. We could just do away with all of that.
This way the Lemmy devs have to maintain a seperate website. Curate a list of instances. I have to agree with that. Everyone has to remember to always post links to join-lemmy.org. Users who’re just lurking and deciding to go to the menu and just click “sign up” will miss that information. All of that to save someone from doing a single click?
Assuming most people use Google, when searching for “lemmy”, it is the third search before some guy named lemmy and when searching for “join lemmy” (logically) it’s the first. So we can conclude that people don’t use it because most of the people link to lemmy.world and not to join-lemmy.org. Most likely not everyone searches for “join lemmy” anyways since most people come from Reddit.
I know if offers options to people, but the majority of people don’t want options, they want a single website
I guess a balanced approach would be to suggest Lemm.ee as a default option, and suggest the join Lemmy link for people curious about options
A default option is bad imo. We want a decentralized platform. Distribution will keep the fediverse alive and well. Maybe a dynamic “default” option would be one solution. One that just changes the default option to a different somewhat known instance once the current default option reaches a certain user count. For this to work, you’d need to lead people to join-lemmy.org.