Interesting to get some alternate perspectives from one of the most successful (relatively speaking) non-fediverse Reddit alternatives. It could provide insight into where Lemmy could improve.
I don’t think it’s worth spending effort convincing them to switch to Lemmy, though. They’re happy where they are. Convincing Reddit users to switch is a much more effective use of our efforts.
Lemmy gained
over 2000new users in the past two weeks, which is ~10x Discuit’s MAU.Edit: Possibly not actually 2000, as there is a discrepancy between the stats on join-lemmy.org and fediverse.observer. Still likely in the high hundreds, though.
most of the replys seem to be, “it’s too hard/confusing to sign up” we won’t get these people to sign up anyways
or “I didn’t like the culture there” and fair enough, lemmy is pretty crazy, but that’s why I like it
It’s a mess, but it’s our mess
most of the replys seem to be, “it’s too hard/confusing to sign up” we won’t get these people to sign up anyways
I often see people on Reddit saying they had issues with the confirmation email, definitely something for instance admins to look into
and I think Lemmy now allows resending so that’s good
I initially had a hard time getting accepted anywhere - couldn’t find any instances with open registration and the first few places I applied just never responded. I ended up applying to like a half dozen in one go and two of them responded so now I have two accounts. Lol
I’ve always criticized instances which opt to function like a club with applications for this very reason, it makes the signup process less smooth and makes it more challenging and unforgiving to the user. It doesn’t stop spammers and trolls really, it makes the instance less bearable to sign up to.
This:
Isn’t an acceptable solution for platforms which want a thriving community, or to facilitate and support migration from Reddit, and shouldn’t be the Fediverse’s go-to onboarding solution.You can’t stop spammers and especially not trolls before sign-ups, you have to focus on stopping them after sign-ups, many instances already use automated tooling to fight spammers post-signup, some with open registration, and those few don’t have spam problems, stop using this boogyman excuse to create closed echochambers, or to be a control freak and gate signups manually. I’m not buying it as a legitimate threat and no one else should either, it’s a cheap excuse that cowards use to avoid criticism up front. Say the real reason you do it, that it’s your server and you’re digging your heels in, what gets said once we cut through all the bullshit.
If this seems like I’m angry it’s because I am, many admins of large Lemmy servers are single-handedly holding us back and making this place hostile to newcommers, in these trying times no less.
If anyone here is looking for a server that has easy signup, sh.itjust.works is one of the easiest to get into, they do have an aggressive automod so you’ll want to farm some upvotes before doing anything serious and maybe wait a while too, but they probably still are the easiest to sign up to, not asking vague questions or asking for an essay about yourself.
This is another reason why when we tell Reddit users to use Lemmy, we should give them a link to a specific instance that is known to have a smooth and quick signup
sh.itjust.works is probably the instance I’d recommend for new users, they have fast and easy sign-ups and is also decently large and well federated.
As a self instance owner, I agree connecting to other instances communities is not really easy. I need to search for each community I want seperately, then subscribe to them one by one. Some sort of community discovery option would be really helpful.
Have you considered enrolling to https://lemmy-federate.com/ ?
just heard it from you, I guess I’ll give it a shot.
If you own your instance and you are the only account then yeah you will need to do everything yourself.
On instance with several users, every does a bit of discovery so you will get a steady flow of new subs as they get popular.
Seems like people prefer small communities. Kind of the Beehaw effect
I still think the fediverse in general works for that, with white-list federation.
I think so too but I also like, don’t really care. Isolated communities of isolationist people are less consequential and ultimately conflict with the whole purpose of the Fediverse which is connection with others and individual sites cooperating to create a larger space. They don’t want that and that’s okay, they shouldn’t be encouraged to join us if they don’t want to, since they wouldn’t offer us anything worth while and wouldn’t get anything out of it themselves. Very similar to Beehaw, though the difference there is that Beehaw wanted to cooperate but brought isolation upon themselves when they killed their own network effect by shutting out the most active people posting in their communities.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t welcome here if they want to but no one should go and beg or encourage them to join like we do people on Reddit.
Most people there expect Lemmy and decentralized platforms in general to just work as their centralized counterparts, it seems.
That is the problem and they refuse to fix it.
