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

Blaze (he/him)

Thought process about discuss.online and sopuli as recommendations

There is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)

Lemmy.world is too big
Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
sh.itjust.works names contains "shit", which can deter users: https://feddit.org/post/4255611/2825351
lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
feddit.org, is German-centric (sidebar in German first, Matrix chat is in German, meta community is in German)
dbzer0 federates hexbear
programming.dev is topic-centric
blahaj is queer-focused
discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
lemmy.sdf.org does not defederate anyone
lemmy.zip is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad
beehaw is way outdated
infosec.pub is topic-centric
aussie.zone is country-centric
midwest.social is region-centric

I ended up with discuss.online and sopuli.xyz as they have

neutral names
long running history
good downtime
active admins
defederate hexbear and lemmygrad

If people have other suggestions, feel free

[email protected]

Some personal thoughts:

about the content when you first open lemmy: I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either. Still, I had seen smaller communities with cool content and I joined anyway and just learned to use it enough to tailor my feed. Lemmy becomes much nicer after awhile of hanging out and discovering new and cool communities!

In my personal opinion the "Link to specific instances and apps rather than just saying Lemmy" part is the most important. Fediverse IS confusing when you check it out the first time. It took me awhile to make an account because people kept telling to choose an instance that fits you. I know it sounds stupid but it really kept me away from making an account for awhile.

I instance-hopped a couple of times because I joined smaller instances (the recommendation everyone gives you) that then disappeared / were abandoned by the admin. That was not a very nice experience. I know lemmy.world is too big, but honestly it is a very easy and nice starting point to lemmyverse (so is sopuli!).

Also: really appreciate the effort you are putting into growing lemmy, Blaze!

Blaze (he/him)

Hello,

Thank you for your comment!

I joined reddit some time around 2015 and it was not exactly the most welcoming experience with the type of content you see by default either.

I think the main issue here is that Reddit in 2015 didn't have to compete with modern Reddit. Nowadays, you create a Reddit account, you get a few subs suggested depending on your interest and your geodefault, so that's enough to give you a first tailored experience without being first drown into All content.

We can't really replicate that on Lemmy (hopefully one day we will), so the best we have is what I listed above: tell people they should focus on laid back communities.

[email protected]

"Reddit but you can block the part that annoys you"

[email protected]

Content is King. You can have a good chunk of people that manage to go through the UX issues, they will still leave if they don't find what they want. The mirror bots (alien.top, lemmit.online) were meant to help with that, but the people here would rather complain about the post volume instead of learning how to follow only the subscribed communities.

Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third. My proposal to separate user/local instances from topic-based instances has been rejected here, even after I offered to put them under the governance of a wider admin group.

Now, I'm tired of this culture and small thinking. Fine if you want to be proselytizing and convincing people "at retail", but this will not be nearly as impactful if we had a dozen people who had the courage to setup a Lemmy instance with Fediverser.

[email protected]

That is interesting, I didn't know that about modern reddit.

And I agree I hope that we do get something like that. I've been thinking for a while that merging https://lemmyverse.net/communities with instance specific account creation would be really cool, but it has just been a passing thought without much further thinking. I always recommend that link to new people on lemmy (also put it on my account description). But sadly it doesn't have recommendations based on interests / geolocation, Although it does let you filter accessible communities based on your instance, but it could possible also have a tool "choose an instance for me based on my location / interests".

Blaze (he/him)

have a tool “choose an instance for me based on my location / interests”.

https://join-lemmy.org/ kind of does that, but the results can be a bit off. I just tried "Technology", and the first result was lemmy.today, which is fine, but doesn't federate anything, so maybe not the best choice for a new joiner.

"Gaming" gave https://sub.wetshaving.social/ as the first result, not sure it's the best recommendation.

[email protected]

Single topic forums are still doing ok out there on the wider Internet. Create more well moderated, single-topic, federated forums, and then promote those specifically to users who care about those topics.

Don't sell Lemmy to end users. Lemmy is a solution for admins. Sell the specific websites to end users.

db0

Honestly, there needs to be a setting for lemmy admins to specify the default comms displayed to not-logged and new users. Just the firehose of the /all or local is not particularly attractive to most people.

db0

join-lemmy needs to have a better interactive flow to select a server. What they have is difficult and slow to maintain and doesn't take into account server stability or newness (new servers are more likely to stop working once the admin discovers they don't like hosting, or they have a terrible mod experience). But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves, nor utilize sites like the fediseer which already does that. So we end up with a bad "join" frontpage which people like you end up just avoiding which goes to show how bad things are.

There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in , but I can't remember the domain anymore

astro_ray

I am not entirely sure how appropriate my reply is since you name lemmy specifically, but since one can subscribe to particular topics in piefed, I am leaning towards it more than lemmy as an alternative to reddit.

nitrolife

Just my opinion:
No need to focus on reddit. The world is not focused by that platform, and there are other people on the Internet.

To attract an audience, you need exactly to attract an audience. Add indexing by search engines, Add SEO optimization for lemmy-ui, etc. People can find interesting instances exactly in google search after that without any provisioning. That's why web search engines be created.

Blaze (he/him)

Isn't that what /api/v3/community/hide allows? https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35617930

Blaze (he/him)

Lemmy is a very similar platform to Reddit, it makes sense to target those people.

web search engines

The sad thing is that search engines aren't really at the best at the moment, and with Google and Reddit deal, it's not like they are going to promote alternatives forums that much.

Blaze (he/him)

Difficult to sell a forum to people where most mods on Reddit are going to remove posts mentioning it: https://lemmy.ca/post/37657096

People on specific forums are probably happy where they are and aren't going to switch from their established forums. The strength of Reddit and Lemmy is to be able to have several forums accessible from the main site.

The last place that's left is /r/RedditAlternatives, where you just have people who want, well, a Reddit alternatives, and they usually don't mention their preferences.

But I agree with you to an extend, [email protected] is a good example of focused forum. It's a bit unique on Lemmy unfortunately.

Blaze (he/him)

Once Piefed will get Thunder as well as an iOS app, it will become an alternative. That's the main blocker I have now recommending it. Besides that, it's a quite good Lemmy alternative.

nitrolife

Google and Reddit deal, it's not like they are going to promote alternatives forums that much

There is more than one search engine in the sea.

And that would be an argument if it weren't for a completely broken CEO headers in the web interface. I can't attach a screenshot because I changed the web in my copy to the Photon. In general, there are tons of SEO mistakes. At least according to Yandex.

Blaze (he/him)

There used to be a very nice interactive lemmy server selection site at one point which guided you based on interest/subinterest as self-tagged in , but I can’t remember the domain anymore

Yes, it rings a bell too but don't remember it either

But the lemmy devs are not interested in either doing things like allowing servers to tag themselves

Indeed, that's probably a whole topic altogether. If people want to try working on a better join-lemmy website, that would be great, but it seems like people are already spread too thin.

db0

Not really. That just hides it from /all. Just because not want new users to get dumped into /c/politics, or /c/slop, doesn't mean I want to hide their existence from everyone.

db0

Yes, it rings a bell too but don't remember it either

Ah found it: https://pangora.social/

Sadly it's gone offline. sigh