For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
    • Caffeinated_SlothEnglish
      18•19 days ago

      It would help to change the nomenclature. Joining a Facebook “group” makes sense to anybody. Change insider jargon like “instance” to seeker-friendly verbiage like “village.”

      • @grrgyle@slrpnk.netEnglish
        4•19 days ago

        I like that, or something like that. “Server” and “instance” definitely sounds too prickly and technical to a lot of people.

    • @eta@feddit.orgEnglish
      17•19 days ago

      I remember joining reddit when it had the old interface and thinking that it is super unintuitive and complicated compared to all other social media. This didn’t stop reddit from growing and i don’t think lemmy will be restricted by this in the long run. People generally are just not aware of the fediverse and how it works yet but they will get used to it.

        • @eta@feddit.orgEnglish
          11•19 days ago

          The only additional step you have on lemmy is choosing an instance and honestly it does not even matter that much which you choose. I’m not saying it’s trivial but it is nothing that is inherently more difficult.

          Reddit was really strange compared to everything else a few years ago. It only appears easy now because we are familiar with the concept of subreddits now.

            • @eta@feddit.orgEnglish
              5•19 days ago

              What I’m trying to say is that every social network has it’s quirks that you just need to learn. The willingness to learn also depends on how attractive the platform is. With time i see no reason for lemmy to not grow like reddit did.

              If you just google “Lemmy” one of the first results is https://join-lemmy.org/ where you are directed to an instance that suits you. Far from perfect but Lemmy is still young.

              People probably don’t even really need to understand federation. They just need sane defaults to get started and work from there.

                • OpenStarsEnglish
                  3•18 days ago

                  PieFed closes most of those gaps. It’s not quite as fully featured as Lemmy, in particular the search function (but then again, Reddit’s search doesn’t work either?:-P), but it’s super easy to get started on the Threadiverse.

                  For one thing, you don’t even need an account or to download anything at all to start using it immediately to browse content from all across Lemmy. And the Categories of Communities featuring topic areas, which you can customize yourself and/or share with others, provide that multi-Reddit feel that people, especially from Reddit, really crave. See e.g. Arts & Crafts, and note the subheadings beneath, such as Photography. There is simply no comparison between this and e.g. the default setting for Lemmy being to only show Local content (a setting which lemmy.ml still uses today) for those without accounts.

                  Then if you decide to create an account, a wizard walks you through various settings, asking the user for their preferences and automatically subscribing to multiple communities based on the answers. Multiple types of News, multiple types of Politics, how many posts do you want to see with the keywords “Trump”, or “Musk” (no filtering, just a little, or block them all), etc. Or just don’t bother subscribing to certain types of (high-volume or stressful) communities at all, so that it doesn’t flood your Subscribed feed, yet still be able to access them immediately with the Topic Category at any time.

                  It’s not perfect, but it’s damn good:-). And for those who do want it, testing is underway for an app (Thunder).

          • @grrgyle@slrpnk.netEnglish
            3•19 days ago

            Depending on the instance, you might have to put a little more work into it. Not that I’m saying that’s a problem - in my eyes that’s a feature.

        • 3DMVREnglish
          2•19 days ago

          To be fair it is easy, if it allowed you to comment and didnt delete them lol

        • 3DMVREnglish
          -1•19 days ago

          No you cant, karma requirements bud, try making a new account and posting/commenting anywhere?