There’s nothing wrong with that particular demographic or anything, but it doesn’t feel like a win to me if the entire fediverse is just one big monoculture.

I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away? Is picking a server/federation too complicated? Or is it that they don’t see any content that they like?

Thoughts?

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[–] fututio_enjoyer 55 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (35 children)

Is picking a server/federation too complicated?

Yes.

Absolutely.

Literally the single biggest problem with fediverse adoption, brought up in every discussion about migrating to it. It will never replace centralized sites as long as it remains confusing and complicated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/14t9t66/im_so_lost_is_there_an_easy_mode_to_the_fediverse/

https://www.reddit.com/r/LemmyMigration/comments/145epgc/looking_for_a_lemmy_website_try_lemmyworld/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

IMO things would work a lot more smoothly if the official website had a button that made an inversely weighted random selection from the top 20-50 "general purpose" instances and just sent you straight to their site or signup pages. To those who are unwilling to do extensive research, picking from the list they have is basically just choosing randomly anyway.

[–] fututio_enjoyer 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

There are differences between the servers, though. Instead of picking randomly, it should ask you a few questions about what you value and what you intend to do.

I made this account to look at NSFW stuff, for instance. I had read that lemmy.world was the biggest server and it checked all the boxes of allowing NSFW content, downvotes, community creation, etc.. "OK, should be fine." Only after trying it out did I realize that all NSFW thumbnails are blurred and you have to manually open each one, and lemmynsfw.com has a patch to fix that. So if you're making an account for that purpose, it should recommend that server.

Likewise, the admins of different servers have different goals and rules. beehaw is expressly created to oppose rationalism(???), for instance, and disabled downvotes and has heavy moderation of things that don't fit the admins' beliefs. The Lemmy sign-up process should give examples of the kinds of things that have been banned/moderated and ask if that's your thing or not your thing.

It should be kind of like https://chooser-beta.creativecommons.org/

(Also, server administration costs matter? Servers that are hosting lots of images will be more expensive to run. If you're consuming all that content with an account on another server, is that fair?)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

You make some good points. A more complicated chooser could be a good idea. I just went for something simple.

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