this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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I think it's much less intimidating to new users now compared to when I joined last year. The barrier to entry has been reduced significantly.
There are tons of active communities now, mobile apps that work great (this is a big one), and many more tools to block content that you don't want to see.
there is also more diverse content than the crap that was on here six months ago.
when 50% of the frontpage is linux memes... you're not going to gain the interest of most new users. now it seems to be down to about 20%
And cause of windows 11, those 20% are more relevant than ever.
It's also worth noting I've recently been seeing a lot of Linux posts from people who just switched, this was somewhat of a trend on Reddit as well but imo the Linux posting has gotten noticeably less toxic toward newer users and a lot more understanding of the "using Linux without wanting to spend hours configuring everything" perspective.
Side point that's somewhat related to that: I wonder how the growth of other platforms FOSS platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix, etc. has impacted Linux project development. Not sure if it's just me but it seems like it's helped a lot with making Linux communities more accessible.
Do I hear you say there's not enough linux memes? Let's fix that!
Anyway to make the all page more diverse? I feel like it’s just 10 communities that appear there and it’s basically broken down to tech, memes and politics. I’m on lemmy.world and ysint voyager. Every once in a while I see stuff from sh.itjust.works.
I know when I used to use kbin, you first had to let your device sync with other instances before they started populating onto your feed.
From my side
And then a few specific
Please don't delete this list. I am checking it out later.
I knew about most of these, but had not stumbled upon casual conversation yet, thank you!
use Scaled sort
also just using the Subscribed feed is better than All, I spend a lot more time on Subscribed than on All
just look for communities on https://lemmyverse.net/communities
and subscribe to [email protected]
Didn’t even think to try scaled. It most definitely is showing more diverse posts. Downside is that it brings back a lot of non english speaking communities. Still a good option for exploring though!
Set your language options in your profile settings, should hide some of them, I think they're still working on improving Lemmy's default language settings
I still have no clue how instances work but whatever I'm doing has been working fine for nearly a year
instances are just distinct servers really.
and some of them are purpose/politics specific.
From an end user perspective there's not that much to think about, thankfully.
Basically, it's like having two websites that mirror each other's content. You can sign up for Forum A and be able to read and write posts that users on Forum B can also see. People's names are tagged with the name of the forum they are registered at, but otherwise everything you do and see happens on your own site of choice and there's no difference where it comes from.
If Forum A doesn't like Forum C, but Forum B doesn't mind, Forum A can choose to disconnect from Forum C and hide their users and posts, while Forum B can still see both. It only gets tricky when someone from Forum B makes a post that people from both Forums A and C are in, but all of the posts from C users are invisible to A users.
It's like how there's loads of different email providers but they can all still email each other.
Just like Gmail can send mail to Outlook and any other @EmailProvider.com, lemmy.world can populate it's feed/comments from lemm.ee and any other @LemmyInstance.com
Most often I've seen instances use as super communities. Largely revolving around a bigger topic. KDE runs their own with their own subcommunities for instance. They are far from the only ones. Just the one I use the most and a came to mind first. Having your own instance slap server allows you far more control over your communities then just hosting on someone else's server. But from an end user perspective very largely transparent. not even being noticeable oftentimes.
You have a user account "Got_Bent", on an instance (you can think of this as a "server"), lemmy.world. That's your home instance. Thus, you are @Got_[email protected].
You can view communities on that instance. This post, in fact, is on a community on the lemmy.world instance, [email protected].
You can also view communities on any other other instances that lemmy.world is federated with (which is most of them). For example, [email protected]. By-and-large, you can use them the same way you can communities on your home instance.
Reddit is pretty similar, just that with Reddit, there's only one "instance", Reddit.
Instances might go down (so users with that instance as their home instance can't log in and communities on that instance aren't accessible. Some have certain rules about what users who use that instance as their home instance can do. Others have certain rules about what communities on their instance are allowed to do. For example, my home instance, lemmy.today, wants to avoid defederating with other instances (which means that people with that home instance can see all other content). Some instances, like beehaw.org, want to keep some content that might be objectionable to their users out, and will tend to defederate with other instances if they consider them to be problematic. Some instances allow hosting communities that have pornography (like lemmynsfw.com) and some do not (like sh.itjust.works). Same thing for communities dealing with religion or extreme political views, and so on.
In general, it's helpful to have a home instance in the same rough part of the world as you, as it'll make things more-responsive.
New user here........what? Easy to use? I've gotten to the point where I know how to do things, but, it's still needlessly complicated. Yes there are many active communities, but there are also not very many of them. The ironic thing is, you need to be discussing mainstream topics on the non-mainstream platform. If I wanted to talk about my favorite band? Nobody is here to do that. And if I do find a niche community here, but it's on another instance? NOW I know what to do. But when I first got here, I was ONLY subscribing to sublemmys on .world because it's the only way I knew how.
For this platform to grow, we're going to have to make it easy. Like, braindead easy.
Make it so you just click "join". Make it so you're logged in across ALL of Lemmy. Your posts may originate from Lemmy.World, but a non-techie wouldn't know or care about any of that. I see Lemmy making a big deal about the seperate instances. Like it's a selling point. It's only a selling point for people smart enough to understand it.
But imagine Britney. Now Britney is a fictional person I just made up to represent your bottom of the barrel intelligence level of people these days. Britney is just some pretty valley girl. She doesn't know what RSS is. She's never heard of Linux, despite having an android phone. Britney is who you cater the site to. Because Britney is America. She wants sublemmys about "The Voice" and "The Masked Singer". She wants a sublemmy for Taylor Swift. I think you're starting to get the type of person I'm talking about.
You can still operate Lemmy almost exactly how it is now. Just make it so even if you know NONE of that stuff, you can still operate it freely. I will use MySpace as an example (for the brief 4 years it was the top social media). There was a default MySpace look. If all you did was sign up, and do nothing else, you still had a myspace account, and you could still customize it to an extent. It's the basic profile everyone thinks of when you think of a myspace profile. The colors, the layout, the look. It was still usable. Then you had people using CSS and HTML and I think Javascript was available. Now suddenly you have 50 different profiles, all looking completely different. All functioning exactly the same, but you could go as deep or as shallow as you wanted.
THATS what this site needs. Don't take away the stuff for the techie people. Let them go nuts. Let them do crazy things with this platform. But also, to increase userbase, make it as shallow as possible unless the user changes things. America wants shallow and not challenging. America doesn't want to think. Britney just wants a place to type "I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR! I LOVE TAYLOR!" over and over. You can keep her happy, and keep yourselves happy. And I'm somewhere in the middle. It needs to be a platform that conforms to the user. Because if the user needs to conform to the platform, they will not join that platform.