We are at the cusp of becoming the #1 Lemmy instance, which is very exciting. But I wish there was a better way of informing casual users about lemmy and how easy it is to join and use. I don’t think most people need to (or want to) know the intricacies of the Fediverse, but it sounds overwhelming and complicated to them, and as a result they won’t even give it a try, when in fact joining lemmy.world to post on c/cats is no more complicated than doing it on r/cats. I wish we could put ads on YouTube, or on on a billboard or something to tell them/show them that! Lemmy (and Fediverse) will only truly be successful if/when the casual users join.
The majority won’t (see: fumbled attempts at inviting folks to Mastodon), but that’s okay. The trick is to invite them to the instance you’re already a part of, no matter how populated.
If you know your friend is more technically inclined and open to deciding between servers/instances, then you might narrow it down to a few familiar instances you think they’d click with and direct them to one of those.
For the vast majority of folks, however, just invite them to your instance. Don’t give them choice paralysis by pointing them to a bunch of unfamiliar instances and have them go, “uhhh fuck this i’m out” in a repeat of Mastodon’s missteps.
Exactly! But i don’t think word of mouth is enough. Also i think timing matters too; right now there are a lot of people potentially looking for options, but if you google “reddit alternatives” it brings upnonsense articles about how lemmy is not ready yet etc
Tbh those articles aren’t entirely wrong though. Lemmy’s lacking in a lot of critical ways in terms of administrative & moderation tools, personal filtering options, and so on.
It’s just one of only a few options for a federated link aggregator available atm.
True but reddit couldn’t get a video player to work for a decade and it was fine 😂 Joking aside though, I think it goes both ways. Lemmy and others have had so many improvements in a matter of days because of necessity. (Eg the iOS app gets 1-2 updates a day, something that didn’t even exist a couple of weeks ago). So the more people join the faster the updates are and the better the services will be. So I do think active recruitment of people who are less tech savvy is to everyone’s benefit in the end. Advertising may be a stupid idea but I’m wondering what else we can do besides word of mouth (especially those of us who don’t have the know-how to participate in the actual dev process)