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.
I’m not sure being the biggest instance is a good thing.
The more spread out people are, the healthier the platform.
Every instance is run by volunteers, so they can disappear instantly if the admins decide they don’t want to do it anymore. I’ve seen it happen first-hand to very popular instances. The good thing is that the platform continued to exist so communities just migrated to a different instance (or in my case, I just subbed to a different community)
Fair points. Mentioning lemmy.world was just a little bit of “instance pride”! But my main argument is that the majority of people currently coming to lemmy seem to be tech savvy and/or have already been on fediverse. And leaving the rest of the users behind wont work. Many of the greatest contributors to reddit had non-tech specialties that were valuable for commenting on specific topics (eg law, medicine, civil engineering, etc.). I have been wondering how we can show these people that lemmy is not as terrifyingly complex as they make it sound to be.
I think it’s possible – there’s people using email every day all around the world, and really the fediverse isn’t much more complicated than email.
Posted some advice below, but regarding this I’d add: don’t get caught in the weeds of the tech details. Non-tech folks aren’t really interested in federation/ActivityPub, regardless of these being selling points to tech folks.
More important, at least imo, is just pointing them to the instance you’re on and explaining that it can reach a number of other folks.
You might be like, “Hey, so, you’re on Reddit, right? I’m on a similar site called lemmy.fbxl.net, and it’s pretty cool. You can post like you do on Reddit but actually reach people across a bunch of other sites, not just Reddit!” or something like that. Whatever keeps it in terms that don’t get too techy for those that aren’t into that stuff.
Even if in reality it is as easy as opening up a reddit account, for someone like me who likes doing some research beforehand, could be a little tricky. I spent maybe an hour trying to figure out whether a thing such as a best instance exists, so I can open my account there. I did have fun learning about the instances and how the fediverse works, but I’m not sure the majority of people will too.
I do hope lemmy takes off though. It’s really cool.
I did have fun learning about the instances and how the fediverse works, but I’m not sure the majority of people will too.
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)
