I've seen lots of discussion on reddit of users trying to get others to join Lemmy and the prevailing reply is that it is too difficult to navigate and comprehend. Having to answer multiple questions and wait for manual verification is combersome and is limiting growth at a time when nothing should be standing in Lemmy's way. Combine this with server/instance selection analysis paralysis, and you get my point.
The linked mastodon blog post sums up my thoughts, but the TLDR is essentially this:
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don't let dreams of decentralization interfere with the greater goal of achieving the network effect.
We should all be telling people to go to lemmy.ml and sign up. The devs should be too, and they should rethink/remove the questions and waiting period. Hell, just put a captcha. Discussions about servers and analogies to email as an example of federated service we all already use is a waste of breath. We shouldn't have barriers to entry.
Thoughts?
EDIT: I've just found kbin.social and find it has superior signup options. It's just: make an account (email/password), or sign up with Google or Apple. No server talk. Upside is the layout is nice and it acts as a Lemmy instance (threads) as well as a mastodon instance (microblogging). Only downside currently is that their android/iOS app is in development and isn't ready yet, so desktop only.
https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
https://kbin.social/
I think this might be the better recommendation for newbies at the moment.
At the moment, the only tool I know is available for that is https://browse.feddit.de. It should be officially endorsed by the project and available on join-lemmy.org, imo. It crawls the network and allows you to search for communities and see where they are hosted!
As for CAPTCHAs, Lemmy does not use any third-party provider, but rather a little library that generates them given a set of noise functions to apply. I'm not entirely sure how effective the top difficulty ones are at stopping OCR bots and the likes, but they seem pretty good.
I can verify that although the capthas here in lemmy are privacy safe, they unfortunately do not prevent bots. The only thing that has proven to eliminate them, is registration applications.
mmm alright, anti-CAPTCHA bots have indeed been getting way better. Could there be some other library of some sort that yields better images?
IMO its not worth the effort. Bots have beaten captcha, and registration applications, or email verifications, are a better way to handle spam registrations.