Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners

db0

Sure. The suggestion I did for the devs is just to have another tab "suggested" which will be a feed of the preselected comms from the admins. Anyone can easily switch away from it

[email protected]

And then only with deeper knowledge of how the Fediverse functions under the hood - like how "instances" relate to "communities" and specific moderator names, especially when working from a remote account on a different instance than the community structure... Hey, where are you going?

Blaze (he/him)

selection of 20 non-political communities: https://feddit.uk/post/22376629

[email protected]

You forgot about the Linux memes

[email protected]

I'll mention my experience with a server from that list (that I won't name)...

The server worked most of the time but federation kept breaking. The server was rather small. Since you use Lemmy from your home instance, this meant that only a few local communities showed any activity and this was a very low amount of activity. This would go on for days or even well over a week before things got better for a while and then everything started to break again.

It is one thing for a server to just go away. You then clearly know that something is wrong and you can migrate over to another server. It is another thing for the server to generally be online all the time with it just messing up in such a way as to make the whole Lemmy ecosystem seem rather dead.

Things would have been easier if most of the communities I want to interact with were on the same server as my account. The other server, with federation issues, was only home to 5 % of the communities I was following which left 95 % of the communities I wanted to follow as not updated due to federation issues.

There isn't a clear indication of which servers are working great with a proven track record of working great as opposed to "zombie instances" not federating correctly or other instances which are moments away from randomly shutting down. The point is that I feel like my account anywhere will be able to receive and send information throughout the whole Lemmy network or sites. This reduces the concept of federation a bit down towards needing to have an account on a well known working server simply because account migration is such a headache. I can then interact with communities without issues (hosted on well working servers) but I can easily change my community subscriptions as I want to.

One thing that may help for someone is to try and see what communities they want to participate in. If the communities they primarily find interesting are in Lemmy.world then they likely should have an account there to ease any federation issues. The number of communities I follow here are 3 times larger than communities I follow with any other specific instance. This community subscription list is one I figured out when I was on "that other server" so it guided me here.

[email protected]

This is the twitter and reddit ethos. Everyone is Super Smart and You Are Wrong Ha Ha.

On reddit you can find smaller communities where people are more normal and it's closer to having a discussion at a bar than it is going on to /r/politics or something.

[email protected]

What is with hexbear and lemmygrad...why are people calling these out

Blaze (he/him)

To give a counterpoint, the experience on LW in summer 2023 was horrible, due to the constant DDoS attacks on the infrastructure.

Discuss.online has a status page: https://status.discuss.online/

Sopuli.xyz is very stable, and transparent about how they operate: https://sopuli.xyz/post/13531

A few other instances have status pages:

confuser

Shoutout to lemmy.zip, y'all are a great instance!

Blaze (he/him)

What is hexbear? - Lemmy.World

I saw a post that talked about racism towards people and when I talked about it the response I got was very heated and a person even called lemmy.world a community of ‘hitlerites’ I have been around for a week or so and this is my first time seeing such explicit vulgar reaction towards another community, is this a one-off or should I block hexbear?

(lemmy.world)

[email protected]

Propaganda focused instances, with deranged users that attack anyone who tries to fact check and they are protectes by their admins/mods.

[email protected]

To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong. Open https://discuss.online , by default you’ll be set on All - Active. Out of the first 9 posts you see, 8 are about T or M, the last one being a meme.

The fact that they (or you) complain about the "All" timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they're talking about: that's the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.

Besides, the default sorts are active and popularity nowadays, so it only makes sense that stuff that we care about and have to have words with, takes the forefront. If you want to solve that the solution is not "let's ignore what's going on around the world", it's "post more cats" and "post more ich_iel". Or just use the Scaled sort, I don't understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.

And that's right there with the complaint about the 42k users too. The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about. Complaining that for the next people to come in "I'm going to be called a westerner imperialist" is delicious hypocrisy on not noticing how indoctrinated they are.

[email protected]

Agree. I'm of the opinion that the default view for guests should be Local, Scaled. Or alternatively, Local, Popular. But never All, and certainly not mixed with Active.

[email protected]

There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances

[proceeds to list pretty much all good instances, and complains about hexbear]

...I'm curious, what is your definition of "generalist"? Because I suspect it involves "not punching nazis".

queermunist she/her

They support the USs enemies.

Blaze (he/him)

The fact that they (or you) complain about the “All” timeline having the same stuff in all servers shows they have no idea what they’re talking about: that’s the entire point of an All feed! (plusminus stuff like defederation). It would make more sense to compare the Local feed of instances, IMO.

The complaint is not about the All timeline being the same everywhere. The complaint is that most of the All feed is US politics, a topic which is already massively dominant on Reddit. Some people are looking at alternatives because they want to avoid that. If it's the same, why bother changing and not stay on Reddit?

I don’t understand why is that not the default for guests / visitors.

Good point, could be something that could be change by admins.

The people who came first came for very specific reasons and have particulars to talk about.

Well, that's not the case for everyone. A lot of people came here because they wanted third party apps on Reddit.

Blaze (he/him)

Makes me think (or hope) that there’s a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.

If you have a topic you would like to talk about, feel free to post about it in [email protected]. Not sure we have enough people for Sonic, but we can try.

[email protected]

A way of combining communities into “multilemmys” would be great.

Don't mbin already have this?

Blaze (he/him)

“generalist”

Something that is not linked to a country, a theme or a demographic

Non-generalist:

lemmy.ca, feddit.org, programming.dev, blahaj, etc.

Generalist:

lemm.ee
sopuli.xyz
discuss.online

Not sure what you meant with "not punching nazis"

[email protected]

Thanks for the information!

I'm not sure if the status pages accurately show federation issues though (not federating or well behind). I'm not sure if they can easily show that information either.