So this Lemmy place is pretty awesome, and I see it growing by the hour! Just like others link external sites for content here, we should really also share Lemmy content to external (e.g. Reddit, Twitter, etc.) to show others where the users are going now.
Redditors will talk about Lemmy and moving communities here, but it is really best shown that the communities are rebuilding here. Thoughts? I’ve started with a few memes and am starting a new community here as well!
Oh my god, lmao. Yes. How is there even a video so perfect for this situation. I joined kbin instead because having a website demand I pick an instance in order to even sign up when I barely understood what that meant or how they worked was quite genuinely making me panic, and taking my time with it was not helping like it was supposed to.
It’s so normal to me now that I almost forget until I have to explain any part of it to someone. “Oh, don’t worry about joining this one over that one, you’re technically joining every site and also twitter and instagram. That button? It’s the reblog button. It functions as an upvote but some people don’t have it. Other people don’t have a downvote, but it might still be visible on your screen anyway. If there’s a site you hate, you can mute the whole thing, or maybe you can’t. If there’s a site you love, your admin might disappear them and you’ll need a second account to see it again. Have fun!”
Horrible. Why do I love it.
It’s never a good idea explaining the whole idea to someone right at the start unless they ask.
I’ve always just directed people straight to a big instance with lots of home communities, like lemmy.world or kbin.social. After they jump in and have questions, that’s the right time to talk about instances, not before.
Exactly. The more shit you throw into someone’s face, the more confused they will be. Give ‘em enough of a taste that they can see the positives, and let ‘em slowly work through the quirks as they find ‘em.
Besides, I personally think having a bit of a ‘filter’ is good anyway; the scroll zombies at Reddit who’re siding with the admins sorta make me worry about this place getting too big.
Myself, I had no problem with picking and instance. But the one I mostly randomly picked had approvals turned on. Once I realized I wasn’t gonna get to use my account immediately, I abandoned it.
It’s utterly critical that manual approval is not part of the sign up. I tried another site, but many users won’t. Nor will they necessarily come back when their account gets approved in a week (that’s how long mine took).
Honestly shocked you were willing to wait that long. I guess if I saw the notification, I would, but my email is mostly a place to store spam. That is a solid issue, and it’s not like any instance has the manpower atm to delegate approvals to a person/team as a full-time job (which it absolutely would be).
I have to admit, seeing the influx of bots on some lemmy instances makes me nervous about Ernest keeping ours open. It’s really the best defense right now and despite the comparable lack of content I’ve been breathing pretty easy not having seen one single bot in two weeks now.
No astroturfing yet. No vote manipulation. That “vaccines cause autism” bot poster I used to see all the time is still on reddit. I think I’ve seen someone being a shithead twice. Any reposts are people crossposting to other instances or just trying to transfer content here.
But the only way to keep it this way for good is not the kind of culture the internet currently has. Checking everyone’s ID at the door would mostly solve the bot issue that made reddit an untrustworthy, insufferable plague, but in practice it’ll make people look elsewhere. They haven’t been raised to wait.
Having some open instances for the noobs and some walled gardens for anyone sick of it may be the best we can do. Unfortunately, they would have to be very walled, basically only federating with each other. Their pushback would make them seem like snobby elites to non-members and like very tantilzing targets for ad companies to worm into or destroy.
Kbin is often treated as a single site, but there are instances here too!
https://fedia.io/
https://readit.buzz/
https://karab.in
and others.
You can also create you own, just as with Lemmy, so the two are really “the same” in that way.
The video is from a TV series which is a bit cringe but quite close to reality of IT startups called Silicon Valley https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/ it’s a comedy.
There’s even a scene talking about decentralized internet which is so perfect for this attempted push to the fediverse too.
Sending people to the largest servers is how you bog down the largest servers.
There has to be a better way than just stuffing everyone onto the same 2 websites. Not only does that create huge loads and increase syncing times, it recreates the same issue that led to everyone coming here: Power over the whole thing in the hands of just a couple of people.
The network becomes more resilient the more spread out we are, not the more concentrated.
Plus, if people find the idea of multiple websites existing to be confusing, maybe they shouldn’t use the internet?
