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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
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Fediverse
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I think people can handle a simple series of instructions, like (1) download the Voyager for Lemmy app, (2) click the middle button, then click...
What they likely get confused about is the plethora of choices, especially when they aren't even sure that they want to join yet.
At the risk of bringing up unwanted drama, 100% of the time whenever I mention Lemmy to someone, they have admonished me for having done so. But putting myself into their shoes one day, I did a Google search (🤮) for "Lemmy", and aside from the singer, the top hit to an actual instance is... surprisingly to me, lemmy.ml. Next I note that the default search method there is "Local", not "All". NO WONDER they were telling me how politically "extremist" it (Lemmy) is! They see NONE of the posts from Lemmy.World, sh.itjust.works, etc., unless they are submitted to a community on lemmy.ml. Instead, what someone would see by default is "death to landlords" and all the other posts promoting the violent upheaval of Western society, as ofc capitalism is to blame for literally everything (well I mean...), except somehow only the Western variant is in the wrong and everything done by the likes of Russia or China or North Korea is absolutely fine.
Here's an old example I just happened to have handy:
(setting aside truth or falsehood, it definitely has a bias to it, as in both sides were equal, and yes this was prior to the USA election)
The #2 search result by DuckDuckGo btw is Lemmy.World (the #1 is ofc the musician:-), probably bc it has ~80% of all Lemmy users on it, so that is appropriate.
We need to put ourselves into their shoes, not our own as if we were ourselves on the other side of that conversation, but appreciate how they will approach the issues. And the methods used by more mainstream people differ from ours.
Either that, or accept that we are strictly another forum community used chiefly by Linux users, and that we will never be more than that.
Then we need to provide them a single recommendation
While we are talking, a small update on lemmy.cafe: I liked it for a few weeks, but the images stopped showing up properly since a week: https://lemmy.cafe/post/9986198?scrollToComments=true
I now use feddit.org as my default recommendation
Oh no!
That link that you sent me, are you still able to see that post? For me it shows an error, like what happens when a post is deleted by the OP, but I wonder if that is what happened or if lemmy.cafe has switched its main announcement community to be local-only, and if that requires a lemmy.cafe account to read, b/c otherwise I don't even know what their main announcement community would even be. It might have gotten deleted entirely and/or merged into graybeard, or statecraft, but both have not had posts for a long time (unless they did and whatever problem is affecting the database lately has messed up new posts in it as well).
Well that's sad.
If I were you I would ask feddit.org to switch their default sort behavior from "Local" to "All" so that it will be a more welcoming experience for the wider Fediverse looking to see memes and such from the likes of Lemmy.World etc. and not just itself.
It at least defederates from 2 of the big 3, though it also defederates from lemmynsfw.com, which I don't know why so many people (from Reddit in particular) insist on having that in their same account but I bet some people will be resistant to it, but oh well.
May I ask though: why not use lemmy.ca as the default recommendation? It has 4.5x the userbase as feddit.org (the same MAU, just 4.5x more accounts total, so I guess a bunch of lurkers or inactive accounts, but it is at least the same size), 5 admins, already has its default sort set to All, doesn't defederate from lemmynsfw.com, and seems to take user feedback e.g. this recent thread questioning whether to refederate with hexbear.net but based on user feedback deciding overwhelmingly to not. And especially if people in Reddit tend to be from the USA, it would be geographically closer and not confusing to e.g. first describe things in German, then in English.
Hopefully the issues with lemmy.cafe are temporary, but on the other hand communication about such matters is just as important as not causing them in the first place, plus if it's been a whole week and it's still that way... that does not bode well for the future.
I just checked, it is local indeed
The .ca domain and the logo could deter non Canadians by giving the impression that the instance is geared towards Canadians, which is partially true when you look at the sidebar
I could understand why non-Canadians would rather join another instance
How very interesting... beyond lemmy.cafe then, this is probably how Lemmy implements "local-only" in general, restricting access purely to those who have accounts on that instance. I would have hoped for a more nuanced take than simply seeing an error screen for me who lacks that, but it is what it is.
Yeah, I get that and thought the same, but otoh at least it is a straightforward and easy-to-understand bias, explicitly stated outright (unlike e.g. "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers"). If we were to follow that logic though, the rather high predominance of the German language over and above the English one, the latter of which in particular often is left out, is also quite off-putting to me. e.g. see this page: https://feddit.org/c/fediverse, which does not have a German explanation first and then an English one, but instead offers purely a German one and then... that's it, it stops there. English-speaking people are not only after-thoughts, but often not thought of at all. Which to be clear is fine btw - it's their server and they can do as they please with it - but I would not want to use it as the front face for all for all of Lemmy, for that reason, especially if that is a kind of signal that they are sending that similarly to lemmy.ca others are "welcomed" but they aren't the primary focus. And then the default sort being set to Local rather than All just compounds the issue all the more - other instances are again an after-thought, rather than the primary focus.
In contrast, "Canadian" is at least North American, but more importantly so long as it is using English rather than French, lemmy.ca is not as off-putting as feddit.org is, imho. Also, after the elections, A LOT of more liberal/less conservative (including "centrist") minded people I bet are going to be okay with a Canadian social media rather than a "murica" one.
Especially when the choices are so limited.
I think we should keep Discuss.Online in the back of our heads moving forwards - although otoh it might become an unstable/experimental instance if it were to suddenly shift over to use Sublinks ahead of any other Lemmy instance. Otherwise, the only advantage of e.g. lemmy.ca or feddit.org is that they both defederate from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, which lemm.ee has a firm resistance to ever doing.
It looks like you have an account at lemmy.ca - did you like it? It seems to offer roughly the same uptime as feddit.org.
They don't block hexbear: https://discuss.online/instances
One other aspect against recommending lemmy.ca as the one recommended instance is that some Canadian users would prefer the instance to stay local: https://lemmy.ca/post/23600231
Which makes complete sense to be honest, speaking English does not mean that any English speaking user should come to their server while it's specifically country-named and focused.
I tagged you on my other post - I need to focus more on my job right now, but I'm glad that I can help out that much so that you don't have to do literally everything:-). It was only after that when I finally discovered this post (b/c previously I had used a browser search for the word hexbear but that only looked at titles), and yet even so I think I covered what jgrim was asking for - actual reasons to do so, not just "hurr me no likey dose others over der".
If Discuss.Online (DO) were to defederate even only hexbear.net, much less lemmy.ml, I think it would work fantastically well as an option.
That argument pushed against Lemmy.ca (CA) though - I do not agree... mostly. For one, that instance has literally ~1200 MAUs, yet only 21 upvoted that post? And even then, the top community on that instance, mentioned also in that post, is !pcgaming@lemmy.ca with 4.84K MAUs, which obviously is going to show up quite often in the All feed. The solution to that though is to either browse by Subscribed, or else continue to browse by All yet after blocking unwanted communities. If they had wanted to remain Canada-focused, well that ship has already sailed, long ago.
And it is not the only such community either - !fbstolencontent@lemmy.ca (1.79K) and !politicalmemes@lemmy.ca (1.64K) and !fediverselore@lemmy.ca (1.58K) all are geared more towards international (than Canada-only) audiences. That person's argument was a nonstarted even back then, and since then they have definitely lost - though they can (re-)make the Fediverse into anything that they want by configuring their tools to show only what they are (most) interested in. Tbf, otoh there are also some posts that have a tiny bit of an anti-usa stance, like this one: https://lemmy.ca/post/33447213, though I would hope not a deal-breaker.
The only way to know for sure would be to create a post and ask if the admins were okay with you using their instance as the default recommendation for Redditors to flock to. That would also hold for feddit.org though, or Discuss.Online (if they were amenable to blocking hexbear.net and especially if they would also block lemmy.ml), the latter of which I at least got the ball rolling for you:-).
Reading through their "welcome, new users!" post, I came across this very interesting comment. A lot of comments express similar thoughts. So while I think that DO would be a better match than CA (and I would guess that you agree? again, after HB were defederated), CA would still be a good match overall, imho. Not perfect, but especially considering the lack of any other options.
However, feddit.org (FO?) has even more of an offputting "vibe" imho than CA. First, I mentioned that it sorts by Local rather than All, which exagerates even more the focus on German-speaking than English-speaking ones. While many posts seem attractive to a USA audience - e.g. "‘Would you survive 72 hours?’ Germany and the Nordic countries prepare citizens for possible war" and "History will judge German chancellor Olaf Scholz for not giving Taurus missiles to Ukraine, the country's former foreign minister says", many others would act more as a deterrant e.g. "XXL-Leben: Der Fluch des großen Penis" with pictures of men's bulging packages not marked NSFW, and a post about Georgia but it's the country rather than the US state, but mostly I mean that overall on the front-page feed right now I counted and nearly all of the other posts besides those 2 mentioned above (+1 more) are in German. 4 from iech_iel that have the language embedded in an image so not easily machine translatable to other languages.
And even more so than CA that at least has some non-Canadian communities, the communities on FO are even more German- or EU-specific - the top one being !Europe@feddit.org with 3.87K MAUs, which is a bit smaller than !pcgaming@lemmy.ca with 4.84K, and like even !technik@feddit.org that while not unwelcoming to posts in English, the very name of the community itself looks to be in German, as are a large fraction of the posts therein too. I don't know how receptive to a large influx of English-speaking Reddit users that FO would be... but just purely from looking at the communities and posts that are already there, I don't think it's a good "fit".
To attempt to be crystal clear, obviously the above is all perfectly fine and people on FO can do however they please (and on the international stage, Georgia is a nation/country, not strictly a USA state:-P) - I am talking here strictly about the "fit" for average Americans.
Damn, I've hit a character limit:-(.
If you aren't too annoyed at a much too long comment, here is part 2 of 2.
I get that you are frustrated with lemmy.cafe, and I whole-heartedly concur that it is for good reasons, but in case it helps, I do think that, based solely on what you've told me here and what I can see, CA might be a significantly better fit to Americans than FO would be. Not that either would be horrible ofc:-), I'm just talking about absolutely minimizing any potential friction.
Though DO would be so much more amazingly a perfect fit, and now that I've found that previous post, I do strongly think that it will happen (even if lemmy.ml is too much to hope for, though neither FO nor CA defed from it anyway). So if I were you I would use CA for now, but then be ready to switch to suggesting DO very soon? :-D And I hope that I'm helping by saying all of this, rather than coming on too strong like I'm trying to tell you what to do? Rather, I'm trying to emphasize that it is my strong recommendation, as a non-German-speaking American myself perhaps that gives me insight.:-)
Thank you for that post on Discuss.online, let's see what the admins say.
Between feddit.org and lemmy.ca, both have their issues indeed. Let's hope Discuss.online can become "the one", but it would be a bit ironic to recommend the one instance managed by people who created an alternative to Lemmy
I am more fearful that as the USA grows more towards fascism that any USA-based instance may become less stable. e.g. if Project 2025 really does outlaw porn, can all of Lemmy be labelled as "porn" due to the presence of a NSFW post or two, and thereby be taken down? Perhaps people wanting to be admins can volunteer their time to help out other instances across the world without owning any instances within the USA borders? Though the need to have spaces where left-leaning people can communicate with one another will grow all the more as a result.
To be, the issue was never that no major instance was USA-based, location of the servers doesn't mean much nowadays. It was more about the fact that no large instance was geared towards USA citizens (a la Lemmy.ca, as we discussed), with a message such as "a USA instance, for USA citizens, but everyone is welcome". That hypothetical server being hosted in Canada or Europe wouldn't have that much of an impact, it was more to be able to have politics, finance, news discussions related to the USA in one place
Oh yes, totally agreed there, I just presumed that such would most naturally arise from inside the USA itself. Then again, isn't feddit.uk based in Germany? All it would take would be for someone to start it up, and begin attracting new users to it - though neither of those are small tasks, even if it could share hardware with another instance, such as feddit.uk? So if Discuss.Online were to step up instead, that does seem wonderful news!:-D
To clarify why lemmy.ml is one of the first results: it was the first Lemmy instance. It's only the second most populated instance, but I imagine the relative age of the site (5 years, as opposed to lemmy.world's 1 year) has something to do with it.
It also sucks that join-lemmy.org, which comes up before lemmy.ml for me, defaults to recommending random instances. It really ought to recommend making your first account at lemmy.world and switching to a different instance after you've gotten used to the platform. I know it's not ideal to put all our eggs in one basket, and there is a reasonable effort to move communities away from both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, but for new users it might be kind of confusing seeing people talk about sh.itjust.works and lemmy.dbzer0.com and programming.dev as if they're more or less interchangeable
I get the age requirement - as you say it makes sense - though it makes less sense why it isn't up to date information. Anyway regardless of the why factor it helps me understand where people are coming from when THAT is what they see, which is different than what I do, or what I would see if I personally (who would use DDG rather than Google) would see if trying to look up such a thing today.
I also get why they would want to see an example of a working Lemmy instance, before looking at a website called "join Lemmy" - they aren't interested yet in JOINING Lemmy, or information related to that, until they have seen what(ever) Lemmy IS first.
One correction: lemmy.ml has now fallen to fifth place in terms of MAUs (Monthly Active Users), with only 2165 compared to Lemmy.World's whipping 17195. The second place is lemmynsfw.com with 3288, so definitely a steep drop-off from the #1 spot to all others, then #3 lemm.ee with 2996 and #4 sh.itjust.works with 2392. So even just with respect to these top 5 servers alone, ignoring the entire rest of the Fediverse, lemmy.ml makes up at most 7.7% of the Fediverse, which falls further behind with each server added to the consideration (including the one I am on now:-).
I sorta get the historical argument, but isn't that a bit like saying that an actor is alive bc at one point they were, despite how they are currently dead? Or saying that Russia has not invaded Ukraine, bc at one point that may have been true, though it has not remained true for quite a number of years now. Or saying that Nixon is the President of the United States of America, bc at one point that was legitimately a true fact (yet is not a current one). Google results just seem so hopelessly wrong these days, telling people to put razor blades into their pizza and the like, and that if you stand more than 6 feet away from a nuclear blast you'll be fine to survive it safely. There are REASONS for all of how those answers came about, but it definitely highlights how they - and therefore by extension Google results (tbf the AI ones in those latter cases) - are incorrect. But that is what mainstream normies are most likely to use regardless? (Even if they ignore the AI garbage)
Also, those instances sorta are interchangeable?:-P Somewhat at least, which is by design of the ActivityPub Protocol that anywhere you are, you can access mostly the same content. That said, I like where you are going with that: in one sense they are, if not "the same" then at least they are interconnected, yet in another sense they each have a distinctiveness to them, with unique local content (which if marked "local-only" cannot be accessed from the outside, without an account on that specific instance) making them different from all others. And distinct admin+moderation practices, and account creation procedures, etc.
Less like email and more like a fleet of pirate/free trader ships each passing their messages to all of the others (excepting defederations), but remaining distinctive entities unto themselves with their own flairs and styles. And anyone can spin up their own ship and tap onto the Fediverse network to become one of them.